Of course contrarians are usually wrong. For once in a lifetime wins, you’ll be wrong almost always and then payoff. > many people assumed the takeaway is bein

Of course contrarians are usually wrong. For once in a lifetime wins, you’ll be wrong almost always and then payoff. > many people assumed the takeaway is being a contrarian is the best way to make money at all times. This seems odd and I’ve never met anyone who think this or had it as the big takeaway from 2008. I think the lesson is to critically think and find unexploited opportunities. Not to just be a downer all the time. Taleb writes about this quote a bit and has an anecdote of when he was a trader and the office was doing their status meeting with each person saying what they predict the market to do today. Taleb said that he expected it to be flat to slightly up, when a coworkers asked why his positions were all highly leveraged shorts that didn’t correspond with what he thought would likely happen, he explained that he invested for low probability, high payoff bets. Basically, he would find 1/100 chances of a 10000x payoff (illustrative numbers only). So most days it won’t happen and that’s expected.