Safe Haven

Investing for Financial Storms

Mark Spitznagel

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119402510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Investments & Securities
• Index: Business

What is a safe haven?

What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel—one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world—answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.

Part One
What Comes First

At War with Luck

WRITTEN IN BLOOD

In the words of the nineteenth‐century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, thus spoken by his ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra, “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.”

If so, Nietzsche would have loved this book.

It was written with the blood of war against luck, fought over the last more than a quarter century in my life as a trader. It grew organically out of an investing and risk‐mitigation practice as a hedge fund manager and professional safe haven investor. The message of this book has been and will always be lived by me and my hedge fund firm, Universa Investments. (It is our manifesto.)

Talk is cheap. Ideas and commentary are just that. Significance only comes from the doing, from action within the arena. It is not my business, like Sherlock Holmes, “to know what other people do not know.” It is my business to do what other people do not and cannot do (as well as, just as importantly, to know what I do not know). Doing and demonstrating effective safe haven investing is far, far more important than arguing about what it should be. And even among most of those who claim to do it, they neglect those pithy words from Hemingway to “never confuse movement with action.”

This book tells of the foundation and methodology behind how, as of this writing, Universa risk‐mitigated portfolios have, over their decade‐plus life to date, outperformed the S&P 500 by over 3% on an annualized, net basis. More to the point, this performance is a direct consequence of having far less risk. This level of outperformance is rare in the hedge fund industry and among risk‐mitigation strategies in general, which have pretty much all underperformed the S&P 500 during this and most periods. The markets have been good to us because we haven't tried to cheat them; we haven't tried to predict or outsmart them. We have only aligned our investing, in a focused way, with our beliefs about the way they work.

People think of risk mitigation as a liability, as a tradeoff against wealth creation, because it usually is. Universa is, if nothing else, a real‐life case study and out‐of‐sample test that unequivocally proves the point that risk mitigation doesn't have to be viewed that way. Risk mitigation can and should be thought of as being additive to portfolios over time—with the right risk mitigation, that is. This is the mark that I want Universa to make in the markets.

Writing this book has been a labor of love, though it has had a difficult time competing for my attention, which is consumed by Universa. But the book has provided very important opportunities for introspection. It has also made me think more deeply about questions that I am always asked by people about what small “lay” investors can do to protect their portfolios.

As this book is, in part, a response to those questions, I do want to ensure that expectations are set appropriately at the start. This is not a “how‐to” book, but it is a “why‐to” as well as a “why‐not‐to” book. Let's be clear: What I do specifically as a safe haven investor is not to be attempted by nonprofessionals (nor—perhaps even especially—by most professionals). Nothing that I could tell you in a book will change that.

So, I will not be holding your hand and teaching you how to do it; I will not be revealing much in the way of trade secrets, and I have no interest in selling you anything as an investment manager. This book is not about the workings of a specific safe haven strategy, per se; nor is it an encyclopedic survey of all the major safe haven investments. Moreover, it has little if any current market commentary—as this would be entirely unnecessary to the book's point.

That said, there are big investing problems to be solved, and I do explicitly employ at Universa their conclusive solution that will be found over the course of this book. Surely, that's a good thing. After all, if it's such a great solution, wouldn't it be a big red flag if I didn't put it into practice?

My intention in this book is to present the basic concepts underlying my approach in a straightforward manner. One‐eighth of the iceberg is above water, and that's all we need. (While I am forced into the mathematical weeds at times, believe me, I tried my best to stay out of them.) I offer a logical and practical analytical framework to demystify safe havens, for viewing and thinking about their value in mitigating systematic risk, and what that even means in the first place. That is to say, I offer a framework for rigorously testing hypotheses about safe havens and their very existence.

If the only things readers get out of this book are a more realistic and rational premise of safe haven investing and a foundation from which to assess and tackle it—and thus avoid its traps—then the book will have achieved its purpose. It should help the reader and pay back their expense of buying this book manyfold. You will make money investing and you will lose money investing, but, when you look back at it all, what really will have mattered is getting that foundation right.

Investing is a deceptive, uneven playing field for many reasons, and I aim to help level it out a little. (To show you the honor of my intentions, I pledge all of my proceeds from the sales of this book to charity.)

PROBING BETS

This book is the result of a discovery process and problem‐solving effort that began many years ago. I grew up a scrappy, poor kid in the Chicago commodities trading pits, back when they were the center of the financial universe. As a mere teenager, I learned from my mentor, Everett Klipp (“the Babe Ruth of the Chicago Board of Trade”), who told me over and over that “a small loss is a good loss,” and that risk mitigation and survival are everything in trading and investing. His words still ring true today: Take care of the losses; the profits will then take care of themselves. Profits matter only relative to the losses; stay in the game by protecting your capital base, your means of playing the game. Don't predict.

Pretty obvious stuff, except people don't really focus on losses, especially the potential for big ones. In all my experience, most investors don't think about the impact of the downside the way they need to; they just don't.

For me, it began with hands‐on, trial‐and‐error experiments in my twenties as a “local” (or independent) trader in the bond pit in Chicago. (I earned much of my stake in college by writing and then selling the first portfolio management handheld computer program on the trading floor.) It continued in my thirties as a bank proprietary and hedge fund derivatives trader in New York, and even a bit in the hallowed halls of New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. I hashed it out in endless discussion‐walks through the streets of Manhattan with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in the days when we started the very first formal tail hedging program, and he would later become Scientific Advisor at Universa. These ideas were the point of every conversation during countless, reckless longboard skateboard cruises up and down the treacherous hills and dales of Central Park with Brandon Yarckin as we plotted the launch of Universa, where he would become COO. (I still blame Brandon for my separated shoulder.)

And it goes without saying that I have not made these observations from scratch. I owe an enormous gratitude to the explorers who plumbed the depths (“the triad”).

These were the formative years of probing bets, of bold conjectures and refutations, and finding answers to how things worked through success and failure—of a bloody war against luck. The conclusion was my decision to start Universa in 2007, where we have taken our discoveries and solutions and transformed them into a formal, rational, and practical investment approach that solves the big problems and moves the needle for my investment partners.

By opening this book and, I would hope, opening your mind to the ideas it contains, you will have the opportunity to change your perceptions about investing and risk mitigation. These pages will present a fundamentally different, unconventional perspective that I firmly believe is the most effective one for successful investing. It opposes so much of what is hailed as gospel within the collective that is the investment profession. So, we need to think objectively about the orthodoxy and dead‐end dogma of modern finance. We need to be the uncarved block.

To be sure, I have no interest in changing the existing investing paradigm by making it obsolete. I'm no pied piper, and I harbor no delusions of grandeur that the message of this book will ever become “the new gospel according to Mark.” I do not expect for one moment that my approach will ever become another cookie‐cutter, rubber‐stamped strategy of the investme...