I wouldn't read this as Taleb predicting a crash. The gist of his advice is generally that for the classic equity investments (ie buy the Nasdaq), your return d

I wouldn't read this as Taleb predicting a crash. The gist of his advice is generally that for the classic equity investments (ie buy the Nasdaq), your return distribution is heavily negatively skewed. You make money most of the time, and occasionally you suffer a fairly significant drawdown - ie a market crash. Nobody knows when the drawdowns will happen. His thesis is that by their nature, they cannot be predicted. Another way to think about this is that returns are linear, and drawdowns are convex. 90% of your returns are going to be a normal distribution, but the tails become something like a pareto. The simplest thing to do is to hold convex payoff assets - ie buy puts. The devil is in the detail of knowing enough about options to determine what to buy to avoid bleeding all your profits away. This is the business model of Universa - they know what to buy, how much of it, and to a lesser degree when to buy it.