Empirica Capital
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Empirica Capital LLC was a
hedge fund A hedge fund is a Pooling (resource management), pooled investment fund that holds Market liquidity, liquid assets and that makes use of complex trader (finance), trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and ...
founded in 1999 by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Nassim Nicholas Taleb (; alternatively ''Nessim ''or'' Nissim''; born 12 September 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, ...
in partnership with
Mark Spitznagel Mark Spitznagel (; born March 5, 1971) is an American investor and hedge fund, hedge fund manager. He is the founder, owner, and chief investment officer of Universa Investments, a hedge fund management firm based in Miami, Florida.black swan The black swan (''Cygnus atratus'') is a large Anatidae, waterbird, a species of swan which breeds mainly in the southeast and southwest regions of Australia. Within Australia, the black swan is nomadic, with erratic migration patterns dependent ...
strategy. The firm closed in 2005. The investment strategy of the fund has been explained in a ''
New Yorker New Yorker may refer to: * A resident of New York: ** A resident of New York City and its suburbs *** List of people from New York City ** A resident of the New York (state), State of New York *** Demographics of New York (state) * ''The New Yor ...
'' article. One of Empirica's funds, Empirica Kurtosis LLC, was reported to have made a 56.86% return in 2000 followed by returns of -8.39% in 2001, -13.81% in 2002, and -3.92% in 2003, according to an investor letter. Taleb has stated that he shut down Empirica LLC, in 2005 to become a "writer and a scholar". At the time he also "feared he might have a recurrence of throat cancer." In 2007 Spitznagel founded the firm Universa Investments L.P. with Taleb as an adviser using black swan portfolio hedging strategies similar to Empirica's.


References

{{hedge funds Financial services companies established in 1999 Hedge fund firms of the United States American companies established in 1999