Universa Investments L.P., run by Mark Spitznagel (with no ownership, but a significant investment from Black Swan author Nassim Taleb), is opening a new inflation fund, named the "Black Swan Protection Protocol - Inflation" fund (see WSJ article). While worries that inflation will be caused by increased deficit spending are nothing new (see recent blog post), the fund is making bets on what is expect will be hyperinflation - similar to, and possibly worse, than what was observed in the 1970s. Investments in the aptly named fund will include options tied to what are believed will be volatile commodities, such as corn, crude oil, and copper, in addition to associated stocks, such as the gold miners and oil drillers. The inflation fund is also making negative bets on Treasury bonds in expectation of higher yields and lower bond prices. While most investors believe that the economy will have to deal with inflation at some point, the timing is still a matter of debate. Given the use of options in the fund, which in the past tended to be deep-out-of-the-money puts when looking for a sell-off, it would seem that Spitznagel and Taleb are looking for a much quicker and, in this case, higher move to the upside for assets tied to inflation.

We always hear about gold trades "ending in tears" due to the rapid swings of the yellow metal. As some are finding out, apparently gold is not the only commodity with a volatile price (see WSJ article). Declining prices recently have some commodity-specific hedge funds deep into negative territory. As an example, the Ospraie Fund has suffered from bad trades on energy and natural resources stocks, resulting in a loss of roughly $1 billion from a fund that had peaked near $3.8 billion in assets late last year. The fund declined more than 13% in July alone. Back in 2006 the fund lost almost 20% from bad trades attempting to guess the direction of copper prices. Yet before 2006 the fund had returned annual gains of around 18% since 1999. Just yet another reason that asset or fund returns should be compared against some type of reward-to-variability ratio, such as the Sharpe ratio or Treynor ratio, among others, to help determine if you and your portfolio can stomach the swings.