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Daily Missive

The Truth About Black Swan Events

Loading ...Addison Wiggin

August 4, 2025 • 8 minute, 11 second read


black swan eventscomplexityLTCMRickards

The Truth About Black Swan Events

“History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between.”

— Nassem Taleb, The Black Swan

August 4, 2025 — I began studying complexity theory as a consequence of my involvement with Long Term Capital Management, LTCM, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998 after derivatives trading strategies went catastrophically wrong.

After the collapse and subsequent rescue, I chatted with one of the LTCM partners who ran the firm about what went wrong. I was familiar with markets and trading strategies, but I was not expert in the highly technical applied mathematics that the management committee used to devise its strategies.

The partner I was chatting with was a true quant with advanced degrees in mathematics. I asked him how all of our trading strategies could have lost money at the same time, despite the fact that they had been uncorrelated in the past.

He shook his head and said, “What happened was just incredible. It was a seven-standard deviation event.”

In statistics, a standard deviation is symbolized by the Greek letter sigma. Even non-statisticians would understand that a seven-sigma event sounds rare. But I wanted to know how rare.

I consulted some technical sources and discovered that for a daily occurrence, a seven-sigma event would happen less than once every billion years, or less than five times in the history of the planet Earth!

I knew that my quant partner had the math right. But it was obvious to me his model must be wrong. Extreme events had occurred in markets in 1987, 1994 and then 1998. They happened every four years or so.

Any model that tried to explain an event as something that happened every billion years could not possibly be the right model for understanding the dynamics of something that occurred every four years…

My Search for Answers

From this encounter, I set out on a 10-year odyssey to discover the proper analytic method for understanding risk in capital markets.

I studied physics, network theory, graph theory, complexity theory, applied mathematics and many other fields that connected in various ways to the actual workings of capital markets.

In time, I saw that capital markets were complex systems and that complexity theory, a branch of physics, was the best way to understand and manage risk and to foresee market collapses. I began to lecture and write on the topic including several papers that were published in technical journals.

I built systems with partners that used complexity theory and related disciplines to identify geopolitical events in capital markets before those events were known to the public.

Finally I received invitations to teach and consult at some of the leading universities and laboratories involved in complexity theory including Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory.

In these venues, I continually promoted the idea of interdisciplinary efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of capital markets. I knew that no one field had all the answers, but a combination of expertise from various fields might produce insights and methods that could advance the art of financial risk management.

I proposed that a team consisting of physicists, computer modelers, applied mathematicians, lawyers, economists, sociologists and others could refine the theoretical models that I and others had developed and could suggest a program of empirical research and experimentation to validate the theory.

These proposals were greeted warmly by the scientists with whom I worked, but were rejected and ignored by the economists. Invariably top economists took the view that they had nothing to learn from physics and that the standard economic and finance models were a good explanation of securities prices and capital markets dynamics.

Whenever prominent economists were confronted with a “seven-sigma” market event they dismissed it as an “outlier” and tweaked their models slightly without ever recognizing the fact that their models didn’t work at all.

Physicists had a different problem. They wanted to collaborate on economic problems, but were not financial markets experts themselves. They had spent their careers learning theoretical physics and did not necessarily know more about capital markets than the everyday investor worried about her 401(k) plan.

I was an unusual participant in the field. Most of my collaborators were physicists trying to learn capital markets. I was a capital markets expert who had taken the time to learn physics.

One of the team leaders at Los Alamos, an MIT-educated computer science engineer named David Izraelevitz, told me in 2009 that I was the only person he knew of with a deep working knowledge of finance and physics combined in a way that might unlock the mysteries of what caused financial markets to collapse.

I took this as a great compliment. I knew that a fully developed and tested theory of financial complexity would take decades to create with contributions from many researchers, but I was gratified to know that I was making a contribution to the field with one foot in the physics lab and one foot planted firmly on Wall Street.

My work on this project, and that of others, continues to this day.

This Is What Really Matters

This approach stands in stark contrast to the standard equilibrium models the Fed and other mainstream analysts use.

An equilibrium model like the Fed uses in its economic forecasting basically says that the world runs like a clock. Every now and then, according to the model, there’s some perturbation, and the system gets knocked out of equilibrium.

Then all you do is you apply policy and push it back into equilibrium. It’s like winding up the clock again. That’s a shorthand way of describing what an equilibrium model is.

Unfortunately, that is not the way the world works. Complexity theory and complex dynamics explain it much better.

Distress in one area of financial markets spread to other seemingly unrelated areas of financial markets. In fact, the mathematics of financial contagion are exactly like the mathematics of disease or virus contagion. That’s why they call it contagion. One resembles the other in terms of how it’s spread.

What are examples of the complexity?

One of my favorites is what I call the avalanche and the snowflake. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works but I should be clear, they’re not just metaphors. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.

Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche.

You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack.

It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lay there. Then the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.

Some people refer to these snowflakes as “black swans,” because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.

Question: Whom do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow?

I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before or the one after or the one tomorrow.

The instability of the system as a whole was a problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the “snowflake” that will cause problems.

The trigger doesn’t matter.

In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes; it’s about the initial critical-state conditions that allow the possibility of a chain reaction or avalanche.

Are you prepared for the next avalanche?

Regards,

Jim Rickards
Daily Reckoning & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. From Addison: A decade ago we were looking to expand our portfolio of newsletters at Agora Financial. Jim Rickards was out and about promoting his new book Currency Wars. After several productive meetings, we agreed on a deal and began a decade-long collaboration.

The essay above encapsulates our initial intrigue and interest in Jim’s work. We’ve learned a lot from the man in the years since we first met. And I would say, we’re all better investors for it.

We drag out this story today, for all the obvious reasons. The market has entered into a precarious position not unlike the period in 1998 Jim describes above where ramped speculation in a very narrow segment of the market led to the first major bailout by the Federal Reserve of the banking system in my, admittedly short, career.

The episode with LTCM would prove to be the first of many. Bubbles in dotcom stocks, mortgage-backed securities, cryptocurrencies and now perhaps AI build out and speculation in chipmakers and big data all share similar characteristics, which are worth paying attention to closely as they unfold.

We brought Jim Rickards into the Agora fold thanks to his intimate knowledge of how the smartest guys in the room can also run afoul of crises. Few people have quite the front-row seat he had in 1998.

Our mission at Grey Swan is driven, largely, by our own experience and those in the fraternity. We want to tame “black swans” into grey ones by understanding the trends that shape them. And what pivotal events will result in an epic turn in the markets. More importantly, how our money – your money – will be impacted.

Along with anxiety, crises give way to great fortunes. You can check out Jim’s latest insight here: American Birthright.

Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com


The Ignorance of Experts

August 7, 2025 • Joel Bowman

Might it be that experts didn’t know all they claimed to know after all… that the climate is a complex phenomena largely beyond our comprehension, full of shifting dynamics, cascading interrelationships and natural feedback loops… and that maybe, just maybe, human beings are not the center of the universe we (ever so humbly) presumed we were?

A new report by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) certainly appears to suggest as much. Titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” the report was authored by a group of highly credentialed scientists, including, to the chagrin of those who seek to politicize everything up to and including the weather, the former Chief Scientific Officer of the Obama Energy Department.

The Ignorance of Experts
Confidence Games

August 7, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

So far this August, we’ve seen Powell under siege, inflation data in question, and a fresh wave of Trump tariffs — each enough to rattle investors even in isolation.

Yesterday, equities whipsawed after news broke of a 50% tariff on Indian imports, aimed at punishing Delhi’s ongoing purchases of Russian crude. By day’s end, the major indexes recovered slightly, but the tone of the market has clearly shifted.

Trump’s reciprocal tariff deadline — long advertised as a hard line — arrived at midnight last night. But not without drama.

In the final hours, Trump squeezed in one last round of changes: raising duties on India, surprising Japan with rates higher than expected, and teasing China with the possibility of similar action. Switzerland, hit hardest among U.S. allies, may cancel a major jet order in retaliation.

Confidence Games
From Two Centuries to 27 Months

August 7, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

In the past 27 months, more debt has been created in the U.S. than during the first 215 years of the Republic.

That kind of exponential move isn’t sustainable. Like tulip prices in 1637 or shares of Cisco in January 2000, it can’t last. The question isn’t whether this will collapse — it’s whether or not we get a massive market run first.

That seems to be in the cards — what Austrian Economist Ludwig von Mises called the “crack up boom.”

And it’ll be fueled by a combination of debt and the collapse of the purchasing power of the dollar. Not a company’s earnings or AI spend. That won’t be a typical bull market — it’ll be a terrifying one.

From Two Centuries to 27 Months
James Howard Kunstler: Suspicious Minds

August 6, 2025 • James Howard Kunstler

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

James Howard Kunstler: Suspicious Minds