Entrepreneur

Nassim Nicolas Taleb became a full time researcher in 2004, as a university professor. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York UniversityAssociate Member at the Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris[ and Distinguished Research Scholar, Said Business School, Oxford University. He was Visiting Professor at London Business School and the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott and occasionally on the Certificate in Quantitative Finance. In 2008–2009, he ranked fifth in terms of the number of downloaded papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). All these are the reflection of his spokesperson side.

His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of the late-2000s financial crisis. He is a successful entrepreneur and disturbance handler who suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute. Taleb was a pioneer of tail risk hedging (now sometimes called "black swan protection"),[ whereby investors are insured against extreme market moves. So he is also an influential resource allocator.

He has held the following positions: managing director and proprietary trader at UBS; worldwide chief proprietary arbitrage derivatives trader for currencies, commodities and non-dollar fixed income at CS First Boston; chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez; managing...