I’m not saying that’s its impossible to predict a black swan, just that you’ll probably have better luck in the National Coin Flipping Championships. Investors can be best serve themselves, not by predicting specific black swan events, but by insulating against them.
We are most affected by what we least expect. The impact is inversely proportional to the perceived probability. Perceived probability may be faulted by our reliance on a posteriori observation. A black swan is an event which exert a proportionately larger impact due to its low perceived likelihood.
I define the Ebola Virus outbreak as run-of-the-mill white swan. A black swan would be something totally unprecedented… like a deadly mutation of the common cold as rediculous as that sounds.