How A Goat Farmer Built A Doomsday Machine That Just Booked A 4,144% Return; Spitznagel on Austrian Economics-Inspired Investing; A hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb made $1 billion this week

Books by Mark Spitznagel: The Dao of Capital--Austrian Investing in a Distorted World; Safe Haven--Investing for Financial Storms

How A Goat Farmer Built A Doomsday Machine That Just Booked A 4,144% Return

[Mark Spitznagel is a follower of Austrian economics. - JRD]

“Mark Spitznagel’s $4.3 billion Universa Investments has waited 12 years for a perfect catastrophe.”

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A Hedge Fund Pioneer Is Making Some of the Best Goat Cheese in America

“The owner of the award-winning Idyll Farms has a day job in finance.”

“Mark Spitznagel is a guy who gives new meaning to the term “gentleman farmer.”

“In Northport, Mich., among rolling hills and barns that evoke the mountains of Europe, Spitznagel and his wife Amy are producing French-styled goat cheese such as Idyll Gris, which features a silvery ash coating between fluffy light layers of fragrant goat cheese. It’s one of Idyll Farms’s most popular styles, and it has gained serious cred in the world of fromage.”

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Idyll Farms website

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Spitznagel on Austrian Economics-Inspired Investing

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A hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb made $1 billion this week

A hedge fund advised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the man who popularized the "black swan theory," made a killing on Monday. 

The Wall Street Journal's Juliet Chung reports that Mark Spitznagel's Miami-based Universa Investments was up 20% on Monday.

The fund netted about $1 billion in profits over the course of the week, some realized and others on paper, according to the report.

Universa is owned by Mark Spitznagel. See below.

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Universa Investment L.P.

“Universa Investments L.P. (“Universa”) is an investment management firm that has specialized in risk mitigation since it was established in 2007 by Founder and Chief Investment Officer Mark Spitznagel. Spitznagel and Universa’s Distinguished Scientific Advisor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, together began tail hedging formally for client portfolios over twenty years ago.

Universa both formalized and institutionalized the idea of tail risk hedging in 2007, providing live tail risk mitigation for clients during (and since) the 2008 crisis. Cultivated by decades of cumulative development and implementation, Universa’s risk mitigation strategies focus on maximizing convexity—the degree of portfolio loss protection provided for a given capital allocation.”

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