Did you watch the youtube video of him from March this year that i posted a couple of pages back? He still sounds and looked depressed, i originally put that down to some medical condition he might have at the moment. But then someone posted he has been like this the last ten years (closing his eyes when talking)
I am not talking about losing a bit of money. I am talking about losing your life savings/full net worth quickly or worse still: having a big debit balance. That is traumatic enough for some people to jump out of windows, blow brains out..
I wonder if anyone has a copy still of the time he was on CNBC and just got up and walked away. LOL People thought that was weird too, but so many times I've seen him in interviews (even on his own youtube channel), he does that often. I'm not even sure if he's aware of it. Maybe he feels too socially awkward in how to dis-engage from a conversation properly. A couple cents to add regarding the crash of 97. Refco also fucked him. Originally Vic had an agreement with his broker to always get X amount of days/time if there ever were a situation where he had to deposit more margin. However, the exchange closed early due to the crisis that fateful day. Circuit-breakers were a new thing, and Refco said because it was a 'new thing' that they no longer knew how to properly evaluate securities anymore, it had never been done before. So they said the prior agreement of time-extension on margin calls was void (they didn't want the risk in unprecedented times). Well, that's just one of many things that had done-him-in in the first blow-up. The irony, is if he had just 60-120 more minutes, the market had already moved into his favor and he'd have made booku bux. --- As for the pic of Livermore, I've seen it before but didn't realize it was just 24 hours before he shot himself. As for Niederhoffer I do know after the first blow-up, he had 9 of 10, and then 10 of 10 of the symptoms for suicide. In fact, his family had put him on suicide-watch and he was not allowed to remain alone.
I knew Vic many years ago, & read chapters of his book, which he distributed I think a year or so prior to publication. He is super bright, but always a trading accident just waiting to happen. Even if he escaped one wipe-out, another would be around the corner. I think even Soros (I'm not a fan,) whom I believe Victor worked for early on, said that Vic was always fighting the waves coming to shore.
Yeah, i was just looking to see what the monthly track record was for his fund in the years before his 2007 blow up. Seems he had a 35% drawdown in mid 2006 which he eventually recovered from by early 2007, only to have a 75% drawdown later in 2007. -- The Matador fund lost 30.22% in May 2006 turning a 2006 gain of 31% to -6% at the end of May. The S&P was down 3% but Niederhoffer was so leveraged that the loss was magnified ten times to some $100 million... Niederhoffer said "I had a bad May. I made some mistakes, that’s regrettable . . . but one sparrow does not make a spring; and nor does one bad month." June 2006 continued badly with the Matador fund down 12% for 2006. -- He also had a 35% drawdown in the middle of 2002, a few months after starting Matador. But he only had around $10 million in assets then, and the loss was 'only' $3million. His monthly win% between 2002 and 2007, was very high, like 9 out of 10 months were profitable. Including a 32 month winning streak.
I'll have to go back to some records, IIRC he had a close call and came only 10 seconds away from blowing up before it happened the first time. How much further of a close-call do you think there is than that?! lol I have yet to read his 2nd book (it is on my to-read list, trust me), but I do remember in the first, he described bits of himself entrenched in his bait & line tactics and at times totally stuck fully committed on a bluff in the currency markets, praying that the others didn't SNIFF HIM OUT. Then burry him. Totally stuck there with no exit... Now I was just cringing reading that stuff and wondering- is this an exaggeration, or what? Because anyone who plays like that even just a few times is going to blow-the-fuck-out. As a side-note, in regard to Cordier the Options King, it has been said by many that the fact he lasted as long as he did in his methodology, proves that he may have known a thing or two more than the rest of the field. Reason being that he would have been expected to blow-out years earlier. Of course, maybe Cordier was just a random outlier...
Victor is very smart, & yes, that he survived as long as he has, is a bit unusual. But not that unusual: the old story of a million million monkeys, one will type a piece written by Shakespear, etc. The issue is cause / effect, & trading principles. I spoke with Victor immediately about time of 1987 crash. He said he was almost wiped out, as he was heavily long stocks. The only reason he wasn't, was because he was also long a bunch of bonds. But both were due to one of his main errors: he told me he only buys when price is down on day; sell when up. So when markets trend, which depending on time frame, they mostly do, he is destined to failing. Perhaps he changed that "rule," since 1987.
I still have yet to read his 2nd book. Fun fact, in the crash of 98, while Vic got wiped out, his brother Roy's hedge fund actually made a profit of a couple mil by swapping from long to shorts by the recommendations of their AI programs (even though they were late in doing so). Roy could have made much more, but the team refused to obey their own AI when it kept instructing them to switch back to LONGs at the bottom of the crash. Everyone was too worried it would continue and get worse. Another fun fact, Myron Scholes was a classmate of Vic. And while people held Scholes in such higher regard, he also blew up the very next year in almost identical fashion.