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What Happened at Alameda Research

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Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#141
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your Google Images reference, but the content of the discussions on Reddit since this all kicked off have followed enough of a theme that I can take a guess at what some of those people have photoshopped up for the web masses. Probably easier to ask outright, why shouldn't I do a Google Images search for Caroline Ellison?

Because those pictures can produce some darn explosive puking.

[deleted]

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#142

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

>LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. [...] All of these situations are obviously somewhat different, [...] biggest financial frauds/scandals in history.

LTCM shouldn't be in that list because that wasn't fraud. That hedge fund had a flawed math model of volatility of their holdings when a cascade of events got triggered by Russia defaulting on their bonds. LTCM losses were magnified by their over leveraged positions.

A bunch of PhD traders lost their wealth and got their reputations tarnished but it wasn't criminal activity.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#143
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alameda was a hedge fund. It could lose all of its money and it would be totally fine. The moment they touched customer funds it became fraud and theft. This was not accidental. Losing it in trading might have been, but it was trading with stolen funds.

I agree with that. I don't think this was malice though - just extreme stupidity (and hopefully criminal). I think they thought they could trade their way out of it. That's different to malice which goes to motivations.

Alameda just non-maliciously gave their own account special privileges on their own exchange, non-maliciously front-ran customer orders, non-maliciously traded on material nonpublic information (their own exchange listings), non-maliciously used their ownership of their exchange to strike trades that caused them $400mm of losses in one of their multiple KCG-style algorithmic meltdowns, non-maliciously stole billions of dollars from their exchange's customers, non-maliciously lied about Bahamas residents being senior to all other creditors so they could withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars again, non-maliciously "hacked" their exchange wallets to steal additional hundreds of millions of dollars from their creditors, and non-maliciously prematurely unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars of FTT and sent it to binance to dump.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#144

Before or after they were bribing politicians for favourable regulation for FTX at the detriment of their competitors who were not fraudulent? https://prospect.org/power/sam-bankman-frieds-multimillion-d... > Crypto’s supporters in Congress are determined to ignore the massive gap in capacity between the two agencies; in fact, they likely understand that its incapacity is part of its appeal to FTX. A bill proposed by…

FTX has stocked up its ranks with former CFTC officials

This is regulatory capture. If you think it's bad for crypto, wait till you see how bad it is for the agencies that approve our drugs.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ontario Teachers' investment is outrageous. They are charging middle-class people (by definition) good money from their retirement savings to make reasonable investing decisions and do due diligence.

OTPP has quite a solid reputation and this particular investment was a miniscule speculative bet. You can see the performance over time here [1]. [1] https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/investments/our-advantage/our-per...

How do you know there aren't many other bets like this on their sheets?

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#147

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

If only these calls for regulation from the two persons in this interview, could have been heard on time. Most interestingly, and as it's obvious from the interview, regulators were watching these children playing and only poking gently.

At correct time: https://youtu.be/2ozjiX1E7ZA?t=25

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#149
> Having several years’ worth of experience at a trading firm does not make you a geniusーthe top tier of such firms hires well over a hundred new employees every year.

Renaissance Technologies hires less than a dozen new employees per year...

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#150

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

> FTX may be one of, if not the, biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. The media doesn't seem to be treating it as such. Most of that wealth was manufactured in the crypto bubble, not actual money people worked for and put into crypto, just early stage ponzi investors that kept rolling their investment. The wealth, while apparently substantial, was never actually there, I think most understand that the mirage…

This is simply not true. Their liabilities are in dollars because their customers wired them dollars.
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