4 ms·
He doesn't sound like the genius kid that the media had made him out to be. He sounds more like a pawn in some scheme where he was chosen to take the fall.
by ratsmack 4y ago
He doesn't sound like the genius kid that the media had made him out to be. He sounds more like a pawn in some scheme where he was chosen to take the fall.
- zeven7 4y agoNone of what he says makes sense, but it's not because he's dumb. He's clearly trying to go for an ignorance and negligence defense to avoid being accountable for fraud and theft. There's no way he's as dumb as he's pretending though. I don't have half the credentials he does, but it's easy for me to understand (1) how not to take client funds (2) how not to overleverage funds such that a tweet can make $8 billion disappear.
- kosievdmerwe 4y agoThere's also the fact that you don't develop a corporate hierarchy as complicated as the FTX and Alameda clusters of companies (something like 130 companies), due to ignorance and naivety.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoIncorporating in the Bahamas is also a flag for "knows enough to be dangerous".
- elliekelly 4y agoI saw one story where Chamath Palihapitiya said his due diligence team made very simple governance recommendations like “have a board” and “formalize your related-party transactions” and the response from FTX was literally “go fuck yourself”. Given the recent reporting around just how absolutely fucked their records were I can’t help but wonder what on earth they were handing over in response to DDQs? Was it garbage and people invested anyway? Or were they just making shit up whole cloth? Social Capital must have seen something to get their spidey senses tingling about the related-party situation.
- yt-sdb 4y ago"Made him out to be"? SBF is actually pretty smart. He's repeatedly demonstrated a high level of mental quickness and numeracy that is common to traders, e.g. doing Fermi approximations during live interviews. And plenty of professors' kids don't get into MIT and then Jane Street. He was privileged, sure, but he's got the raw goods, too. Which is one of many why reasons I don't buy his claims that the root problem was just "risk management". No, he just committed fraud.
- totalZero 4y agoSmart or not, he clearly made some unethical choices. Compared to the alternatives, Jane Street doesn't exactly select for street smarts. (Nor does MIT, to be frank.) Sam Bankman-Fried's statement to Tyler Cowen that he will take any positive-EV bet regardless of the standard deviation of returns, sounds more like a learned-by-rote answer to an on-campus trading interview question rather than a core tenet of a trading philosophy. Professional traders at major institutions (including Jane Street) care about things like Sharpe ratio, value at risk, and position sizing. Not to mention that Jane Street asks Fermi questions in their interviews. I wouldn't be surprised if the average MIT senior with three or more trading offers could proffer the same kind of demonstrations/responses as what you describe.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago> I don't buy his claims that the root problem was just "risk management". No, he just committed fraud. He must be on some weird drugs that just has him spewing his points left and right. What people are misinterpreting is his claim that he was careless and that the accounts where poorly labeled. Those aren’t him trying to say he wasn’t a fraud,m, that’s him saying that he could have kept the fraud going if only they hadn’t been too highly leveraged.