Investors see black swan, but it's not the movie.

Byline: Shahriman Johari

ARE investors seeing a black swan in the Middle East? It is quite likely and it would probably explain the funk that many are feeling about the stock market.

The Black Swan is a 2007 best-selling book by Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese Wall Street trader. He describes black swans as unpredictable events that have massive impact, arguing that history is full of rare events that can't be predicted by trends. The book title was based on the fact that for a long time Europeans thought all swans were white until they found black ones in Australia.

A year after his book came out, house prices in the US crashed, taking down with it much of the …