In a stimulating contribution to the literature on performativity in economic life, Elena Esposito points to the pervasiveness of what, drawing upon the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, she calls ‘second-order observation’. Translated into our terms, it is not simply that mathematical models in finance have performative and counterperformative effects, but actors observe or anticipate those effects and act accordingly. A recurring suspicion that actors within finance have about the many models that involve the bell-shaped normal distribution, on which extreme events are very unlikely, is that their use can have the counterperformative effect of increasing the likelihood of those events.