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https://www.universa.net/index.html

2020-06-29 17:14

paperplane

look at the website, so COOL
https://www.universa.net/index.html

2020-06-29 17:15

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Spitznagel’s $4.3 billion (assets) firm Universa Investments and his team of about a dozen PhD’s, mathematicians and trading experts earn their money by making trades that nearly always lose small sums–but very rarely generate astronomical payouts. Universa buys short-term options contracts that protect against a spike in volatility, or a plunge in markets, which are highly “convex" and “out-of-the money." In plain English that means it would take a sudden, major crash for the trades to pay off. Every trading day, investors around the world make a little easy money by selling Spitznagel options.

2020-06-29 17:16

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Until one day–maybe only every five or ten years–a black swan appears, terrorists ram jets into skyscrapers or a global pandemic freezes the global economy. Then the tables turn hard and Spitznagel makes an enormous amount of money, more than enough to make up for all those many days of small losses. And those caught feeding on Spitznagel’s bait find themselves trapped in a trade that carries almost unfathomable losses. Sometimes they’re wiped out entirely.

2020-06-29 17:17

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Take March, a month in which the S&P 500 Index cratered nearly 30% at its lows, shedding trillions in market value. Spitznagel had bought puts—or the right to sell the index at a specified price—well below the prevailing market price, and the firm had its best month ever.

2020-06-29 17:17

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Universa’s flagship “Black Swan Protection Protocol” fund earned its near two dozen institutional investors a staggering 3,612% in March, putting its 2020 gains at 4,144%. From his remote farm, on April 7, Spitznagel fires off an update to his investors that is soon read worldwide. “These returns likely surpass any other investment that you can think of over the period you have been invested with us,” he crowed. “Kudos to you for such a sound “tactical” allocation to Universa.”

2020-06-29 17:17

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Universa returned 115% in 2008 and Spitznagel used proceeds from his coup to buy a Bel-Air mansion from singer Jennifer Lopez a block from the home of his hero Ronald Reagan. Five years later, Spitznagel published The Dao of Capital, a dense 368-page libertarian economic treatise that lambasted central banks for the crisis. Unlike most bears who try to time bubbles, Spitznagel’s playbook is different. No matter the circumstance, he’s always giving away free pennies to the market in order to maintain an arsenal of bearish bets that could be worth thousands of times their cost if markets go haywire.

2020-06-29 17:21

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Spitznagel is also unconcerned about the Fed’s save-the-market-and-economy at all costs approach, given that it has already pumped $6 trillion of dollars into a host of different securities markets.

Says Spitznagel with the cocky assuredness of poker pro,“There is a limit to sovereign debt and there is a limit to central bank balance sheets... When I thank the central bankers of the world for my business, I’m not kidding.”

2020-06-29 17:24

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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.[12] In general terms, he does this by owning far out-of-the-money put options on stocks. He has called “investing Übermensch” Friedrich Nietzsche’s slogan “amor fati”—or the love of one’s fate—“the secret to successful investing.”[13]

Spitznagel is dismissive of Modern Portfolio Theory, and specifically its emphasis on correlations and mean-variance (or Sharpe ratios),[12][14] and skeptic of market forecasts,[12] although, according to a New York Times article, he predicted two market routs in the past decade, first in 2000 and then in 2008,[15] as well as the “2000s commodities boom.”[4]

He has described what he does as lowering what he calls the “volatility tax” paid by investors—"the hidden tax on an investment portfolio caused by the negative compounding of large investment losses.”[16] 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.”[17]

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.[18] 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

2020-06-29 17:26