30 Jul How to tell your Black Swans from your Regular Swans?

From its beginning as a Latin expression, “black swans” was used as a term to describe impossibility, taken from the assumption that all swans must be white, as historical records exclusively stated that swans had white feathers – until black swans were discovered in Australia in 1697. Years later, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory, from his acclaimed 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, would focus on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable events and the tendency to find oversimplistic explanations for them. Since then, the term has become part of the risk management lexicon and often misused.