Mark Spitznagel

Mark Spitznagel began his trading career on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, where he worked as a pit trader for Everett Klipp, learning the craft of market making and options pricing in a tactile environment. He later studied mathematics and philosophy and formed a close intellectual partnership with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose Black Swan framework shaped his thinking on extreme risk events. In 2007 he founded Universa Investments, a fund dedicated to tail-risk hedging — purchasing deep out-of-the-money options designed to provide explosive payoffs during market crashes while accepting steady premium bleed during calm periods. The strategy requires institutional investors to accept sustained small losses during normal markets in exchange for catastrophic protection. Universa reported returns of approximately 115% for all of 2008 during the global financial crisis. In March 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 market collapse, Universa reportedly gained 3,612% — an almost unimaginable single-month return. Spitznagel is also a philosopher-investor, having written "The Dao of Capital" (2013), which integrates Austrian economics and Taoist philosophy into an investment framework emphasising roundabout paths to profit. His work has made Universa the world's most prominent dedicated tail-risk hedging vehicle.