Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Back in 2011, on the day I launched my first business, what looked like a statistical miracle

took place in my kitchen. Poaching eggs for breakfast, I cracked open four eggs. The first was a double

yoker, something I'd heard of but never seen before. The second, also a double yoker. I called my wife

in, cracked the third egg open, again a double yoker. With a sense of anticipation, I cracked

open the fourth, four double yokers in a row.

What are the odds against that happening? Huge, you might think. I decided that such an unusual

event happening was a good omen for the business that was launching that day, but I also went on to

Google to try and find out what might have caused this.

A few days ago, amusingly, the day my new book on statistics launched, I cracked open the first egg in a new carton and it was a double yoker.

Once again I decided it was a good omen, but this time I knew that the carton likely contained

more double yokeers.

When I looked up the probability of an egg having two yolks, I learned that one in every

thousand eggs on average is a double yoker.

So if the probability of finding an egg with two yolks is one in a thousand, then the likelihood of discovering four in a row can be simply calculated

by multiplying the probabilities together four times.

1,000 to the power of 4 brings us to 1 in 1 trillion,

a trillion being a million million. If true, that would mean that the event that

occurred in my kitchen back in 2011 was a trillion to one event. But is that true? The short answer

is no. Whenever something that unlikely happens, you have to question if something else is going

on. What you have to consider is the fact that these eggs are likely to come in clusters.

I learned that double-yoked eggs almost always come from young hens that are 20 to 28 weeks old.

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