The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Black Swans Inbound

Enrico Caruso went to bed in his hotel room after he had sung Carmen at the Grand Opera House. When he woke up, he and his bed were on Market street. It was at 5:12 AM when the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906 woke him up. That illustrates what a Black Swan event is. It is something 100 times beyond what we would expect to happen. In the early morning, Caruso was on the street with no hotel to live in, no electricity, no running water, no  sewers, no railroads and the city around him on fire and. It took him 2 days to go 27 miles (45 kilometers) to Stanford University. He never went back to San Francisco.

Caruso had just experienced a Black Swan event.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, described these events by three key attributes: extreme rarity, massive impact, and retrospective predictability.

A Black Swan event is something well beyond what we are prepared for. Investors have to make decisions about what is in their range of possible events.

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https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2026/09/03/black-swans-inbound/