No. 6: Marvelling, a core skill of successful investors
Back in the 1960s, Fama was one of the economists who observed an excessive frequency of unlikely returns on shares (fat-tail distribution). Using the metaphor of the ‘black swan‘, Nicolas Taleb suggests that our world is shaped not only by the unlikely, but also to a significant degree by the unthinkable, the ‘impossible’. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld coined the expression the ‘unknown unknown’ in 2002. Phenomena such as the ‘fat tails’ of stock exchanges or even the coronavirus crisis, which can be expected to a certain degree though not forecast for individual situations, are referred to as ‚grey swans‘.