Saturday, May 12, 2007

Hit by a Black Swan, My Computer Crashed!

For all this time we had been looking at the possibility of “black swan” risks or tail event risks (low probability but high impact events) that could harm our portfolios, unfortunately I got afflicted by a nasty one, but this time outside the realm of financial investing-my computer crashed!

Add to my woes is the HUGE possibly that my entire 5-year collection of financial market data, ebooks, analysts’ articles including my own have been obliterated!

Even while I was warned early this year by some friends on the exigencies of having a backup, I kept postponing the decision in anticipation that a limited access to financial sites would expose me to lesser risk of contamination.

How I was wrong.

After allowing my son to dabble on my computer Wednesday night, particularly burn some downloaded music on his CD, my windows failed to start on a corrupted window file last Thursday. After failing to successfully restart several times, I tried the systems recovery option. Then the entire system went haywire.

The lesson learned is that black swans exists even beyond the financial realm and that it pays to keep ourselves insured in whatever undertaking we do. Failure to ACT is a damning experience.

Now with shortages of references and limited access to our much required data, I am now constrained to take a “forced vacation” from my posts.


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