Mark Spitznagel

Biography

Born in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Apprenticed at 16 to the Chicago grain trader Everett Klipp, he became an independent pit trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, then a proprietary trader at Morgan Stanley. In 1999 he set up the tail-hedging fund Empirica Capital with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his former professor at NYU, and in 2007 founded Universa Investments, now based in Miami, with Taleb as an adviser. His argument is that the biggest cost to investors is the damage large losses do to compounding, so cheap protection against crashes can let you earn more over time, not just lose less. Universa’s investor letter reported a 3,612% return in March 2020 on its tail-risk fund. He draws on the Austrian school of economics and is a critic of central bank intervention.

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