In 2007, economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb authored the now-famous book on randomness and empiricism: The Black Swan. Taleb’s Black Swan quickly became a term for events which are extremely rare, unforeseen, and have a disproportionate impact. In the context of economics, black swans are particularly important because the types of analyses and predictions which economists and finance workers perform are inherently vulnerable to black swan events. If the manager of your hedge fund isn’t well educated about risk and black swans, you could be setting yourself up to lose a lot of money very suddenly– or potentially, to become rich overnight unintentionally, though it’s less likely.