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Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

theguardian.com

121–130 of 255 posts

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#121
post #65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's all just a little joke. Super funny to every single person who lost money to the person "getting in the record books for 'most money lost by a single individual'".

Well, if you're going to roll the dice with an unregulated securities market because you want massive profits, it helps to have a sense of humour about it.

Yeah, because victims of financial fraud always know the risks.

/s

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#122

She’s the queen of wallstreetbets. I think she’ll hold the yolo record for a long time. I wish we knew what the fateful market play was that sunk her ship. She mentioned she’s not a fan of stop losses, so I wonder if she went to bed with an open market position and woke up to negative three billion. Also I wonder if the entity on the other side of that trade realized they were making someone insolvent. It’ll be inter…

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Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#123

Strange (re: The Guardian, not HN). By today's 24-hour news cycle standard, this is arguably "old news". These documents have been available for at least 24h. I know because I submitted them to HN yesterday. Ellison's Plea Agreement https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/r478tCuj... CTFC v SBF, Ellison and Wang Amended Complaint https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rRCRC2hQ... Wang's Plea…

Not particularly strange. There are whole web pages devoted to the "right time of day" to submit something to this site to catch the most early up votes.

Really? I didn’t know that. It makes sense that there would be patterns though.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#124
Is it surprising that besides Ellison and Wang none of the other inner circle of FTX/Alameda has cut deals yet? There's at least 8 people that were likely aware of what was going on no? See:

"Who's Who in the FTX Inner Circle"

https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/22/the-whos-who-of-t...

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#125

She’s the queen of wallstreetbets. I think she’ll hold the yolo record for a long time. I wish we knew what the fateful market play was that sunk her ship. She mentioned she’s not a fan of stop losses, so I wonder if she went to bed with an open market position and woke up to negative three billion. Also I wonder if the entity on the other side of that trade realized they were making someone insolvent. It’ll be inter…

I think you are assuming way too much here. She's not the queen of anything, she's a fraudster that will spend a long time in jail and that has probably much less understanding of the mechanisms involved than you give her credit for. If she did she wouldn't be in the position she's in. The last thing we really need is for people to start lionizing her.

You’re reading this wrong. They love her because she didn’t have the credentials to do what she was doing and seemingly didn't le care. Honestly, all power to her for taking billions of dollars from investors that didn’t do basic due diligence because they were too greedy. You tell me where the deception/idiocy is happening: The most prestigious VCs going around talking about ‘vision’ in flip-flops sipping on kambuchas giving her the money and losing it, or the 20 year old with 1 year of experience taking that money and trading without stop orders because it’s so yesterday?

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#126
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leniency is a relative term. It's relative to the size of the harm, number of victims, her centrality to it, etc. If there's a for sure bet to be made here, it's that she will be spending many years in prison for this. Just not her whole life. That's what leniency here means.

I think she'll probably do 36 months or so. Not nothing but also not life-destroying.

How are you calculating that?

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#127
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Maximum sentence of 110 years.

I have always wondered why "x" and "conspiracy to commit x" are different counts.

One is an inchoate crime.

It's a way to let a prosecutor get ahead of an unsuccesful, and basically a freebie in terms of sentence amplification.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#128
post #67
post #3

I wonder if something similar will eventually happen to the Tether people? To my understanding they're printing money (USDT) which they claim is backed 1:1 by USD but really isn't. These USDTs can then be spent to pump up various other crypto assets. Seems a very shady business.

My conspiracy theory is that USDT is actually well backed, but the Tether people intentionally make it look shady so they can buy the dip and arbitrage against panic selling. Some volatility would actually increase their ability to profit.

My current theory is that they are not fully backed, but they are backed enough for it to not really matter (ex: if they are 95% backed with highly liquid assets, it's very unlikely that they'll ever breach that).

And given the current interest rates, they could just be parking it all in short term US treasuries, and slowly fixing the issue. If they play their cards right, they can migrate to something that is both fully backed, and highly profitable.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#130
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's all just a little joke. Super funny to every single person who lost money to the person "getting in the record books for 'most money lost by a single individual'".

I've been trying to find an account of anyone who had a large portion of their wealth in FTX and not just some highly speculative investment they could afford to lose. Was anyone actually trusting these people with their life savings?

There are plenty of people who treated FTX as a high savings yield account and just kept it there.

Most don't want to talk about it now since it's embarrassing but look at the trading firms with writes down of 50% or more.

For small timers, they are just under reported like with Luna, there are probably a fair amount of suicides, but govts don't reveal details to avoid emotional group contagion

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