Empirica Capital LLC was a hedge fund founded in 1999 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in partnership with Mark Spitznagel, that used Taleb's black swan strategy.
[5][4]: 157 The investment strategy of the fund has been explained in a New Yorker article.
[7][8] Taleb has stated that he shut down Empirica LLC, in 2005 to become a "writer and a scholar".
[3][9][10] At the time he also "feared he might have a recurrence of throat cancer.
"[9][11] 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.