alt Hacker NewsSituational Awareness down 67% in July in AI stock rout
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This is everywhere. For reference, former FTXer and OpenAIer raised $225m into a hedge fund structure, went long and short, and reportedly peaked at $40bn of value; leverage bit hard this week and they sold their entire-ish portfolio to Citadel at $10bn. (Which, I imagine was very likely aiming at this outcome in their trading in the last few weeks).
Not reported anywhere -- was additional money raised in to the fund, and what is the LP basis? The story might be: wunderkind 40x+ed his first hedge fund and sold it to Citadel, or it might be: wunderkind raised $20bn and turned it into $10bn fast trading against Citadel.
Inquiring minds want to know!
> Aschenbrenner party blamed short sellers who targeted the firm’s positions for exacerbating the fund’s losses, the letter said. The letter compared Situational’s experience to a bank run.
4 years ago, it was SBF blaming Changpeng Zhao for shorting FTT and triggering a run on FTX.
Now another EA has followed the path of making a lot of money relatively quickly and losing it just as fast, using the exact same arguments for why it happened.
An inexperienced portfolio manager that’s never seen a down tech market in his life has created a massively leveraged position on frothy assets in a bubble and the bubble is looking ill. What could possibly go wrong.
Many of these AI plays are massively entangled and leveraged. It all looks good until it doesn’t and when there’s a hiccup things unravel quickly and exponentially. I fully expect in the next 12 months we’re going to see some rather spectacular investment implosions with folks losing their shirts. Get your popcorn ready.
I found a tweet purporting to show the letter that Leopold sent to his LPs - it looks pretty thoughtful and doesn't sound as bad as some news sources seem to be portraying.
>Even including July's losses, the fund remains up about 80% on the year
Spectacular blowup and a lesson on leverage, but let's not miss this line.
I like how Matt Levine formulated it.
His thesis was correct. The problem is, his thesis was measured in years if not decades when his funding was measured in days and hours.
Earlier on HN:
Martin Shkreli breaks down the collapse of Situational Awareness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49119380
Edit: added context
Worth noting, even with the margin call, he's still up 80% on the year: https://www.ft.com/content/a0a5e3a7-c4e6-42a6-9a7b-a780422bc...
Deja-vu from dot-com. The tech-wreck had similar hedge-fund road-kill. Munder net-net fund comes to mind. A lot of hubris and leverage on a thesis that is not proven, and liquidity matters. Data-center debt will likely see similar debris in the next several years.
Equally interesting to me is how Citadel made up a rumor about the FED raising rates at this weeks FOMC meeting causing a historic selloff in AI stocks which then allowed them to pick up Situational Awareness on the cheap.
> Situational’s gains earlier in the year were so large that, even including July’s losses, the fund remains up about 80% on the year, the letter said.
80% return is still excellent.
Where do I sign up to get $100M to dump into long AI positions?
Situational Awareness. Fitting name.
Incredible that the founder is engaged to be wed this very weekend to the chief of staff to Anthropic's CEO
"Smart men go broke three ways - liquor, ladies and leverage."
Yesterdays news. High leverage. Sounds like citadel got a deal.
And yet:
> Despite the July losses, Situational Awareness remains up about 80% on the year and holds a portfolio of investments in private companies including Anthropic.
80% return (YTD) is the type of performance for which many hedge fund managers would sacrifice their first born.
Quite the funny headline. It initially made me think that someone had come up with some sort of quantitative measure of the situational awareness of traders, and was claiming that there was an increase in traders making dumb trades that misread the situation or something.
Ironically, I would describe this selloff as an increase in situational awareness.
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Shocking to see a highly levered and highly concentrated fund blow out /s
He played his cards well given the incentives. Most investors wouldn't tolerate such recklessness, and accordingly, most funds have to operate under strict risk management or they don't get funded. PMs at multi managers are only allowed about 5-8% drawdowns.
Leopold's public visibility gave him access to dumb money whales who allowed him to personally profit off the variance by collecting bonuses when times were good, leaving the investors with the bag when the blow up happens. These investors got lucky that there were still gains after the margin call. Being up 80% after such a large drawdown is bad performance on a risk adjusted basis and is not distinguishable from chance due to the magnitude of the variance.
https://archive.ph/PCjtG