Universa Investments

Universa institutionalised tail-risk hedging before most allocators had a name for it. Mark Spitznagel founded the firm in January 2007 to do one thing: buy deep convexity, mostly far out-of-the-money puts, so that client portfolios gain violently when markets break. It is explicitly not in the business of directional alpha. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Spitznagel's partner from their earlier Empirica Capital, serves as its scientific advisor.

The approach is built to look like dead weight for years and then pay for itself in a single crash. In March 2020 the strategy reportedly returned around 3,600% as markets collapsed, the kind of result that vindicated two decades of refinement. Universa moved from Santa Monica to Miami in 2014, well ahead of the broader migration of managers to Florida.