ValueArb

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/billionaire-targeted-by-hindenburg-emerges-more-rich-and-unbowed Object lesson how you don't target a company with a tiny float for a short. Turlov "only" owned 71% of Freedom, but when the stock price dropped after Hindenburg's report it looks like a bunch of friendly clients bought in to create a short squeeze. It doesn't say he orchestrated it, but one could assume...

Sequoia Capital isn't Sequoia Capital anymore. Their entire process was revealed to be a joke by Sam Bankman Fried. Not only was he playing League of Legends while they interviewed him, but when replying to the question of what his vision for FTX was he replied ""You can buy bitcoin, You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX." the partners all applauded him instead of saying, does this even make sense? And gave him $250M. Alfred Lin went on twitter after SBF's conviction to say they did their due diligence but Sam lied to them, and is rightly getting crushed for it. They did no real due diligence when they didn't realize they were giving $250M to a business run on Quickbooks. Let alone not uncovering his history of lies about FTX, Alameda and his trading history.

All becomes clear.

I thought Porter Stansberry has been long outed as a total fraud? Why would Tilson reference him at all? The only Porter I trust is Porter Collins.

Yep, American. And there are definitely special "gringo" prices there, it wasn't that cheap for me. But the transplants I talked to were wise to that game and lived pretty cheaply.

I thought the point of Bridgewater wasn't that it would beat the market, but that it would have okay returns while have much smaller drawdowns than the market. Because outside of the GFC it hasn't been a market beater. The other point is that Ray Dalio is a master salesman. He's sold the world on the idea that he's an elite investor, that Bridgewater is an elite investment firm, and gotten a huge amount of professional trustees to buy into it with funds entrusted to them. Mr. Dalio drew an indecipherable chart on a dry-erase board and rambled on about the nature of markets. He barely mentioned the specifics of Bridgewater’s approach, according to a person present. There was an undeniable charm — and confidence — to it all. Bridgewater’s marketing team had seen this move before. The end goal would be something other than money. So when Mr. Otemurat raised the prospect of investing $15 million in Bridgewater’s main hedge fund, the fund’s representatives shooed away the suggestion. “We don’t want a relationship with you right now,” one marketing executive said. “We’re in it for the long game.” Inside Bridgewater, a relationship meant access. The country’s new oil field had taken more than a decade to develop, with near-constant delays. Anyone who knew how the project was proceeding could adjust bets on oil accordingly. Bridgewater’s representatives told the delegation that their firm would be happy to offer free investing advice, and Bridgewater’s team would likewise appreciate the opportunity to ask questions about industries of local expertise. Mr. Otemurat and others in his delegation seemed eager to chat. Soon enough, Bridgewater got it both ways. A few months after Mr. Otemurat’s Westport visit, the Kazakh fund asked again if it could invest in Bridgewater’s funds. This time, it dangled a sum far larger than $15 million, and Bridgewater assented, former employees said.

Went to Costa Rica in October because best friend was hanging out there for a month with a family friend to help her build her resort. Air far was super cheap ($500) so I said why not? Flights were pretty long tho, ended up being about 10-12 hours through texas each way. When I got there it turns out that her "resort' was deep in the jungle on the pacific coast, it took two hours to get there from airport on mostly dirt roads. And she had been in an accident so we had to take her to physical therapy in town every morning which was a 2 hour drive over same bumpy roads. And the only time I saw the beach was on the way back for an hour or so a day. My cabin was surrounded by howler monkeys who woke me every morning at 5 AM, but fortunately my buddy was the only one with a scorpion in his room. So I had an amazing time. Food was outstanding, people were super friendly, beaches were great and lots of cool dogs!

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon is asking Bankman-Fried about his many statements in media interviews. “I’m saying I don’t remember,” he said about one. “I’m not sure what I said,” he said about another. In one email exchange displayed in court, he told WSJ reporter Patricia Kowsmann that Alameda and its traders didn’t have special access to certain data or trading.

Bankman-Fried has been hesitant to answer questions about whether Alameda had special privileges on the FTX platform. “Sitting here today, you don’t recall assuring customers that Alameda generally played by the same traders as other customers on FTX?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon. “I’m not sure,” Bankman-Fried said. In one email she displayed in court, he said Alameda’s account was like everyone else’s.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon is asking about some of Bankman-Fried’s communications, to contrast what he said privately and publicly. In one message on Twitter, he wrote to a Vox reporter, “f— regulators.”

Bankman-Fried is facing questions about a document about FTX’s core principles, which he promoted publicly, including before Congress. The principals included maintaining adequate liquid resources so FTX could return customer assets upon request. “You submitted this under oath to Congress, right?” Sassoon asked. He acknowledged he had.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is confronted by his own tweets about customer protection during a cross-examination. In one instance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon brought up a 2021 tweet in which Bankman-Fried said the crypto exchange’s “user funds and safety come first.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon is still focusing heavily on Bankman-Fried’s public statements, particularly those related to assuring customers that their money was safe on FTX. Bankman-Fried is repeatedly saying he doesn’t remember some of these statements, although acknowledges they may have occurred. “You recall saying that you had built a responsible system,” she said. “No, but I may have,” he answered. She then asked whether he had said FTX had a healthy take on risk management. “No, but I may have,” he said.

From WSJ "FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s media tour after the crypto exchange’s collapse is coming back to haunt him in court. While cross-examing Bankman-Fried, assistant U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon brought up his interviews last year with Twitter personality Mario Nawfal and Financial Times journalist Joshua Oliver. In those interviews, Bankman-Fried said he was intentionally not involved in Alameda’s trading decisions in 2022 because he was concerned about conflict of interest."

I always wondered how good a "trader" SBF actually was at Jane Street. The first interview I read of his where he described a japanese bitcoin arbitrage that he claimed was an example of how his trading firm Alameda was running rings around the crypto market. But later it turned out there were legal and regulatory limitations that meant the trade was unlikely to be scalable in any useful size. Then FTX collapsed, in part because Alameda had lost so much money. Then Michael Lewis described how "smart" SBF was at tricking other Jane Street traders into giving him profitable bets, and again it turns out that SBF got the math wrong and his bet was about as far from optimal as possible. How smart is this guy really? I think one sign of intelligence is not lying in public in ways that are sure to bite you in the ass later.

Same myself, apparently because the famous aircraft carrier battles were in the Pacific. I was surprised to find out she was at Casablanca, and attacked shipping in Norwegian waters. Never knew.

Why can't you have suggested this while I still owned Seritage?

I've submitted requests on Odeon site asking for Michael Zlatin to contact me about opening an account but radio silence. Any email addresses?

It's crazy that such tiny carrier at 15,000 tons could carry as many planes as the Lexington and a crew of over 2,000.

Building fresh Abrams tanks may or may not be necessary, but it isn’t economic growth even if measured that way.

My advice to you is try to take your dog to that nursing home once a month. My 94 year old neighbor loved my dog and I'd always drop by to chat when walking her. Then I got divorced, had to sell the house and move to a place where I couldn't easily walk by. Didn't go back for months and he passed away and I felt terrible about it.

The average price of anything increased 93% from 1976 to 1984 due to inflation. Also median home prices can be misleading. Typically homes have grown significantly in size and standard features (AC, etc) over time, but during periods of high prices it's likely that that trend pauses or even reverses to maintain affordability.

Thanks, great perspective.

From Matt Levine's column today. I'm assuming the model automatically adds a markup for the bank's profit, otherwise selling derivatives at expected value makes no sense. Either way, it seems like a very problematic process. What happens if you have a banker who prices some very risky derivatives without incorporating their extra risk and you only find out later after they blow up into a huge loss for the bank? I presume there is another layer of approval he skipped in order to make the description simpler. But the other thought that occurred to me is what if the client has some inside information that radically changes the expected value of the derivative? How does the bank ensure their bankers can ferret it out when thats occurring, or when the derivative is so specialized that the risk of informational imbalance is there?

I'm probably the least qualified to guess at this, but I'm assuming that much of their worker income is linked to that exchange rate. The weaker the Yuan gets the cheaper chinese assembly gets for foreign manufacturers but the less buying power the chinese workers have. When large groups in any society see their buying power diminish, even if it's much higher than it was decades ago, they tend to get restless.