Universa Investments

Established in Q1 of 2007, Universa Investments (Universa) is a Florida-based hedge fund manager that focuses on tail hedging as a means of enhancing long-term equity returns. Its portfolios are, by construction, designed to be robust to extreme risk assumptions, exceedingly positively skewed, and non-linear to common risk factors (such as beta). Universa believes that its economic edge derives ultimately from basic behavioral biases. The strategies are designed to capture that edge through a focused and disciplined investment approach employing positively-skewed payoffs, empirical and fundamental-based option valuation, and trading/providing liquidity against systematic order flow imbalances and resulting mispricing in options markets. The firm was founded by Mark Spitznagel, a former proprietary trader at Morgan Stanley (head of equity options in the Process Driven Trading group) and partner/president at Empirica Capital.