Mark Spitznagel

Mark Spitznagel (; born March 5, 1971) is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He is the founder, owner, and chief investment officer of Universa Investments, a hedge fund management firm based in Miami, Florida.

He is known as a pioneer in so-called "tail-hedging" or "black swan" investing, an investment strategy intended to provide "insurance-like protection" against stock market crashes.

Early life and education Spitznagel has a graduate degree in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and an undergraduate degree from Kalamazoo College. Spitznagel became an independent pit-trader at the Chicago Board of Trade and later a proprietary trader at Morgan Stanley in New York.

In 1999, Spitznagel and author and financial mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who was Spitznagel's professor at NYU) established the Empirica Capital "tail-hedging" fund.

Investment career In 2007, Spitznagel founded the hedge fund Universa Investments, where he is the Chief Investment Officer; Universa offers a type of insurance against extreme market risk. Taleb has been associated with Universa as an advisor for nearly two decades.

In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that "a strategy consisting of just a 3.3% position in Universa with the rest invested passively in the S&P 500 had a compound annual return of 12.3% in the 10 years through February (2018), far better than the S&P 500 itself" (and portfolios with "more traditional hedges").

Moreover, "Universa was among a handful of funds that made huge gains" during the 2008 financial crisis.

Investment approach Spitznagel's self-described investment strategy is focused on risk mitigation in portfolio construction, and is intended to allow his clients to take more systematic risk.

Spitznagel is dismissive of Modern Portfolio Theory, and specifically its emphasis on correlations and mean-variance (or Sharpe ratios), and skeptic of market forecasts, as well as the "2000s commodities boom". He detailed in an investor letter how "mathematically, it is the rare big loss, not the frequent small losses, that matters most to long-run compounding," and called the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli "Universa's Patron Saint".

Spitznagel wrote a book in 2013 titled The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World about the Austrian School of economics and its ostensible application to investing. Paul Tudor Jones said of Spitznagel's book that it "shows how a seemingly difficult immediate loss becomes an advantageous intermediate step for greater future gain, and thus why we must become 'patient now and strategically impatient later'."

Political and economic views As a libertarian and advocate of Austrian economics, Spitznagel has been very critical of central bank monetary interventionism. For instance, he has written pieces on Ludwig von Mises and about the Fed's alleged culpability for "increasing wealth disparity", which focused on the economic distortions that ostensibly result from money creation.

In his book

Along with entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Spitznagel was a major supporter of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign of U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, a friend and fellow libertarian who "shares [Spitznagel's] contempt for the Federal Reserve" and his desire for a non-interventionist foreign policy. Spitznagel was also senior economic advisor to the 2016 Republican presidential campaign of Ron's son, U.S. Senator Rand Paul.

Spitznagel has not been optimistic about the tariffs President Trump has instituted, calling the plunge in April 2025, "a trap."

Personal life Spitznagel is among the many financial executives and hedge fund managers who moved their residence and operations to Florida. In 2014, he moved his hedge fund offices from Los Angeles to Miami, citing Florida's "more hospitable business and tax environment" than California's. There is no income tax or estate tax in the state of Florida.

Spitznagel also reportedly flies planes and practices ashtanga yoga.