From the article: "Still others say their models simply failed to predict how the markets would react to near-catastrophic, once-in-a-lifetime financial events

From the article: "Still others say their models simply failed to predict how the markets would react to near-catastrophic, once-in-a-lifetime financial events like the credit crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers." The fact that they still believe those events were "catastrophic," or "once-in-a-lifetime" means they still haven't grasped the fact that markets aren't Gaussian. As first Mandelbrot, then others showed, financial markets exhibit a much larger number of extreme events than a standard Gaussian distribution. Therefore, any trader that doesn't update his or her models to use a non-Gaussian model won't just be wiped out once. They'll be wiped out again and again as they get blindsided by the "once-in-a-lifetime" price swings that happen to happen every decade or so.