Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quote

It was a few years after the beginning of the Lebanese war, as I was attending the Wharton School, at the age of twenty-two, that I was hit with the idea of efficient markets—an idea that holds that there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless, particularly to a businessman, since prices can already include all such information, and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage. Odds are that one or more of the hundreds of millions of other readers of such information will already have bought the security, thus pushing up the price. I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). But this argument was not quite the entire reason for my dictum in this book to avoid the newspapers, as we will see further benefits in avoiding the toxicity of information. It was initially a great excuse to avoid keeping up with the minutiae of business, a perfect alibi since I found nothing interesting about the details of the business world—inelegant, dull, pompous, greedy, unintellectual, selfish, and boring.