I noticed that, particularly during the pandemic when discord investment/trading groups sprang up all over the place. Seemed all were run by Millennials and it was strictly forbidden to say ANYTHING that didn't worship Tesla for example. You couldn't even criticize or mention things such as the un-breakable windows all being broken during a failed demonstration... Reasons like that convince me that there is such a thing as a perma-overrated stock that has a cult-like following by feeble minds. Religion has migrated into equities in today's age. Just as closed-minded as theology always has been.
The apology video is quite cringy and comes across as a spoof. However, Cordier obviously was not in the right frame of mind, having just lost everything, not just a lot of wealth, but his credibility, etc. Also, he wasn't the only hedgefund manager who blew up after being on CNBC. There have been multiple if you wish to take a look. It is unfortunate (for me) that this event happened just a couple months or so short of Cordier & Gross's 2nd book on Options to be published. I have the original and have read it a few times. I'm not going to say it's a great book, but I definitely was looking forward to seeing his second publication, Unfortunately, that's been canceled and looks like there are no signs that it will ever make it to print now.
"For all his touting of options, for all of his success in getting others to invest in them, Cordier never put any of his own money into options. In a 2009 interview with the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), he explained why: 'The best way to invest for my clients without emotion is not to have skin in the game. I do extremely well investing for 300 people.' " LMAO
Santelli does not intentionally start with the least significant data. He starts reporting the data as it is posted at the CME. If all the data got posted at the same time he would start with the most significant data.
There is a saying... live by shorting vol, die by shorting vol. This actually caused so much tension between the Niederhoffer brothers, that finally Roy split up with Vic, and went off to set up his own fund, taking the LONG side of vol instead of SHORT which seemed much safer a bet to him. One of them blew up, I'll let you guess which one that was. I believe Cordier was a floor-trader before starting his hedgefund biz. He seems to have done well getting where he did. That said, looks like fate finally caught up to him. It has been mentioned from multiple sources that the fact he did not have a major blow-out years in advance leads to the conclusion he did know more than the average joe on trading these derivatives. That said, 7-standard deviation moves occur, particularly in commodities that are known for potential vol squeezes. For nat-gas, it's about once every 7-years or so for this extreme? Very unfortunate for those who are on the wrong side of the trade when that happens.
Yeah, like we still rely on cord phones to communicate with our brokers. Dude, turn off the damn TV and focus on the chart. Problem solved!
From what I recall, before putting in his fate-full trade orders, he had put on hedges to try to minimize risk. Unfortunately for him, the perfect storm came that hit him on both sides of his hedges at the same time. There are also some theories by those who have looked at the trades in post-analysis, that he may have put in 10x the size of one batch of his orders by mistake (fat-finger), etc. And then there are the pressures, presumed by some that he may have been forced to take on extra risk in order to make up for gains before the year ran out.
Cordier is an amateur. He only had a community college diploma in computer programing. And then just took some commodity courses and started working for some commodity trading brokerages as an introducing broker, namely in sales and maybe a broker who took clients' orders over the phone and then executed them. He never worked as a trader, floor trader or in any capacity undertaking independent trading activities. After working several years in brokerages, he decided to form his own company and get his own clients. https://www.tampabay.com/business/h...be-apology-after-losing-150-million-20190206/ He was neither trained nor experienced in trading or in any asset classes, not even in stocks. The guy is a smooth talker, has some good taste and knows how to throw a great party and that's about it. I read one of his books that I downloaded for free out of curiosity. No offense to you who bought the book, but the entire book had no substance, no analysis and was nothing but one big sales pamphlet pushing for naked shorting with no mention of the fat tail risk, the volatility smile, no nothing. Nassim Taleb would've had a stroke reading his book. LOL And the scary thing is he didn't just write one book like this but THREE!! And he was even touted as an expert and actually got invited by CNBC and Bloomberg, media outlets that are supposed to be knowledgeable about the financial industry and financial expertise to give his "professional opinion". All the financial brokerages and investment managers are supposed to "know your client". I really feel it's actually more important for the clients to "know your advisor" or "know your investment manager". James Cordier and many others are prime examples of fakes who bedazzle people with fancy terms and obscure concepts and hide behind them to make themselves out to be "experts". I also feel sorry for those people who lost their life savings by trusting him. It's only right that he was not in his right mind when he made the video. He lost $150 million of people's money and all he could think about was cuban sandwiches and watching sunsets!! Shows he's not a trader.
No what he did was naked short calls on nat. gas and naked short puts on crude at extremely OTM strikes (what he referred to as "making small turns when steering a boat") with no hedges because he was already earning just pennies on each contract since he was selling extremely OTM strikes that had very little possibility of becoming ITM so there was no way he would've been able to hedge. On Nov. 14, that fateful day natural gas went up an unprecedented 20% in one day and crude dropped on the same so all of his clients were fucked on both the naked short calls on natural gas and naked short puts on crude. If he hedged, he would be earning nothing. And in order to earn the % of returns that he promised to his clients, he shorted huge amounts of contracts via leverage so those are not fat-finger mistakes.