I'd be more impressed with Taleb if he published the results for his Emperica fund for years other than 2008. Taleb's strategy was to buy options way out of the money. In boring years, the fund lost money. It did really well in 2008. Not enough numbers have been published to determine if his strategy was a net win over a business cycle. The win seems to have coming from the fund's short lifetime including 2008.
You only need to win once. One of his big things is about optionality and anti-fragility. If you buy something that barely hurts you in terms of cost, but can sky rocket massively if something big happens, you can capitalize on it, and all other costs were meaningless. Even VCs try for that, although with numbers that aren't nearly as good.
What do you mean by a business cycle? If his fund just goes until it makes it big and then he stops, is that not a business cycle? Did he continue? I don't know. It just seems weird to ask about a business cycle in the case of a strategy that is very long played, waiting for unpredictable results. The only thing that matters is can you play long enough to hit that result if that is your game? It seems clear that it did win, or else he'd probably be focusing more on it until he did? It's not like a regular business with actual output or production that can be easily replicated and measured, it's just a play till you win or lose deal and I'm sure there are others that did similar things and lost, just like many more companies are dead than alive and we only see the alive ones.
I understand wanting to see the numbers, but this is just one sample for a strategy.
