Ten years after the financial crisis, with the bull market now the longest on record, “black swan” fund Universa Investments chief investment officer, Mark Spitznagel, spoke on Bloomberg TV and said that “We are going to continue to see deeper and deeper [crashes], simply by virtue of the fact that the degree of interventionism is larger and larger.”
In other words, trading for “the end of the world”… but not expecting it to come tomorrow. In fact, his advice to traders is simple: “you mustn’t fight the Fed. What you must try to do is sort of jiu-jitsu the Fed. You need to sort of use the Fed’s force against it.”
Easier said than done?
For most, yes: founded in 2007, Universa quickly rose to fame the very next year when it made huge profits in the crash of 2008. On the other hand, as the WSJ wryly notes, “being skeptical and making money on that view are two different things.” Fellow financial crisis standout John Hussman, who predicted both the 2000 and 2008 bear markets, is convinced an even worse one is coming, yet his own fund has performed dismally since 2009, eroding its crisis gains and then some.
This is where Universa stood out.
Unlike John Paulson, David Einhorn and Steve Eisman who made stellar returns during the crisis but have failed to repeat their success since, Spitznagel has enjoyed several mini-bonanzas along the way. During the ETFlash Crash of August 2015, his fund reportedly made a gain of about $1 billion, or 20%, in a single, unforgettable day.
But was that performance repeatable, and could it beat the market in the long run… and certainly before the inevitable crash?
To be sure, as the WSJ’s Spencer Jakab writes, “talk is cheap in investing punditry and predicting a decline without saying when it will happen is cheapest of all.” Yet Universa’s stance warrants attention, and not only because it backs its views with billions of dollars: Spitznagel isn’t betting on some unpredictable event causing a crisis but instead a predictable one—an eventual blowback from unprecedented central-bank stimulus.
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