[10][11] In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that "a strategy consisting of just a 3.3% position in Universa with the rest invested passively in the S&P 500 had a compound annual return of 12.3% in the 10 years through February (2018), far better than the S&P 500 itself" (and portfolios with "more traditional hedges").

[12] In 2010, it was alleged that a large trade by Spitznagel in the minutes leading up to the 2010 Flash Crash (when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 9% of its value during the day) was among its primary triggers.

[20] Paul Tudor Jones said of Spitznagel's book that it "shows how a seemingly difficult immediate loss becomes an advantageous intermediate step for greater future gain, and thus why we must become 'patient now and strategically impatient later'.

For instance, he has written pieces on Ludwig von Mises[23] and about the Fed's alleged culpability for "increasing wealth disparity",[24] which focused on the economic distortions that ostensibly result from money creation.

In his book[21] and in a 2015 op-ed, Spitznagel connected every similar high point in the Tobin's Q-ratio since 1900 with past monetary interventionism and subsequent stock market losses, which he called "perfectly predictable, by economic logic alone.

Congressman Ron Paul, a friend and fellow libertarian who "shares [Spitznagel's] contempt for the Federal Reserve"[26] and his desire for a non-interventionist foreign policy.

[29] In 2014, he moved his hedge fund offices from Los Angeles to Miami, citing Florida's "more hospitable business and tax environment" than California's.