Mark Edwards
335 posts





Finally got access to 𝕏 Money!



Nassim Taleb breaks down the Black-Scholes formula - and the story he tells starts with a forgotten man. Louis Bachelier priced options 73 years before Black-Scholes - and modeled Brownian motion 5 years before Einstein. it was 1900. a 30-year-old Frenchman defends a thesis under Henri Poincaré that quietly invents two fields at once: the math of random markets, and the first real formula for pricing options. his reward? the committee marks it down - "too much finance." no top grade, no patron, no career. he spends his life applying for jobs one rank below what his work deserved, and dies forgotten in 1946. then 1973: Black, Scholes & Merton publish the option-pricing formula. it reshapes Wall Street and wins the 1997 Nobel - for two of them (Black had died, so missed it). almost nobody remembers the Frenchman who got there first. and here's Taleb's twist: traders never actually use Black-Scholes. what the market runs on is a version of Bachelier's original. the Nobel, he argues, wasn't even for the pricing - it was for dressing it up to fit the economic theory of the day. ~15-min lecture, free. the man who built modern finance — and watched the credit go to everyone but him ↓



























Rucking is cool until it compresses your spine and you lose 2” of height


















