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Investors Are Looking Forward to a Recession, and Maybe You Should Too
How investors capitalize on the dark economic times
Mark Spitznagel had his great epiphany at age sixteen. On a visit to the Chicago Board of Trade to meet family friend Everett Klipp, he was captivated by the allure of the markets.
Klipp ran a futures trading firm, and for Spitznagel, he soon became a mentor. During that time as an apprentice, in summers away from school, nothing became more important than a lesson: learning to take small losses to realize huge returns later.
That teaching proved vital a few years later when an unexpected rise in interest rates brought down the Treasury markets. While many traders were wiped out, Spitznagel managed to save himself.
In 1997, the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund became the fuse that materialized years of subconscious thinking; Spitznagel decided to implement and refine an investment style that would take shape from panic.
In 1999, Spitznagel enrolled at New York University’s Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences to study with Nassim Taleb, the author of the best-selling Black Swan. And that same year, they launched together a hedge fund called Empirica, which they closed after a few years.
