That is not correct. They do not provide the long component. They don't care what you do with your assets. You are paying them to insure x% of your portfolio. You could be long bitcoin for all they care.
Ah, I see Maverick. That makes sense. Thanks. Someone mentioned I think I publicly traded tail risk fund or ETF or ETN, not sure if it was on this thread or another, need to find that one and look at the returns on big down periods to see how much protection they seem to give per $ invested. Thanks!
Thanks Maverick! So, let's just look at some quick numbers. These are all just off the small yahoo finance charts, so they may be off a bit, but hopefully not too far off. SPY: 1/26/18 - 286.58 2/8/18 - 257.63 10.10% drop TAIL: 1/26/18 - 21.78 2/8/18 - 23.19 6.47% gain SPY: 3/9/18 - 278.87 3/23/18 - 258.05 7.47% drop Tail: 3/9/18 - 21.52 3/23/18 - 22.72 5.57% gain Those were some high and low points on the SPY just looking at the charts. TAIL opened it looks like on April 6, 2017 at 25.00, closed Friday at 22.36, for a decline over its life of 10.56%. During that same time, SPY went from 231.03 to 263.43, for a gain of 14.02%. So, TAIL seems a generally poor hedge against market drops - it didn't rise as much as SPY dove. And it loses money at a pretty quick rate to boot. Although, maybe the idea is that TAIL won't really take off until there is a much bigger drop in the market - 30% to 60%. Thoughts? Thanks!
I think Universa lies about their returns and deliberately obfuscates their performance. There’s an NYT article that insinuated that they also run long portfolios with tail protection. They were claiming returns that were in line with long SPX - a few percentage points. https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/bear-going-vs-the-bulls-still-profits/ It doesn’t make sense that any long vol fund would earn spx returns from 2009 onward without being long the market.
Haha I had come across that very same article newwurldmn. I saw this quote: The Universa strategy has produced gains of 10 percent this year, slightly less than the stock market overall. It’s been up every year since 2008, according to the materials. I agree they cannot logically just be paying for tail protection and making positive returns year after year, with the market going essentially contrary to tail protection positive returns. Even the first video in this thread talks about an overall long approach - I suspect these may be long funds with tail protection. Or at least some of them.
That brings up the next issue...your tail risk fund, vehicle, whatever, has to "perform as advertised" when the time comes. Many did/do not. (Not saying TAIL will not).
TAIL is a simple rules based ETF with no leverage. It's not as robust as perhaps a true hedge fund and why would it be. It just gives you something to look at since most hedge funds in this space don't publicly report their numbers.
OK, so I have an issue with this. Say you were an investor with Universa. And you read some article where they are stating they made X and you know they made Y. One, you could sue them. Two, you would certainly pull your money out. And three, they would be in violation of countless securities laws. This is what Madoff did. He is in prison now. I know there are scummy guys out there, but believe it or not, most of them report their numbers accurately to the 4th decimal point. I'm not saying you are lying, but it would shock me if ANY high profile fund lied about their performance in such a tightly regulated industry. At the very least it would cause their investors to pull out. I mean if the manager is lying about their performance, why would you trust them with your money. I don't get what the upside is for them to do that. Can you cite any fund that you can prove has publicly lied about their performance that is still a going concern today?