so between last week's Michael Lewis book, and this week's coverage of the trial, i've been following the story & it seems like they left out the most juicy bits unanswered who was on the other side of FTX's trades?? it seems like the ball really got rolling for them (downhill fast) after they had a "view" that bitcoin should be priced under 20k which probably meant they were shorting it like crazyy & lost the initial 200 mil, which then seemingly led to a series of other desperado trades to martingale it back, which ended up only proving to the world that martingales don't work, even if you have a whole platform with everyone's trades fully transparent and "$65 bln" line of credit idk why the math majors thought it was a good idea to fight the trend/ pick up pennies etc i hope they reboot FTX under new mgmt soon & let the funtimes start again, the 24/7 action was incredible
I think you got it wrong. FTX was a brokerage and theoretically the customers were on both side. Alameda was the investment company and genius fuckboy illegally sent money (aka customers' funds) to Alameda. Where did they invest? Your bet is as good as mine, but I think they put it in a bunch of worthless crypto, because numbers only go up. There is no fucking way SBF would have shorted crypto... After googling it: "The lion's share went to Alameda's biggest investment of all, bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets, in which it invested $1.15bn across 2021 and 2022. Nine of the 16 companies operate in the troubled crypto space," So they invested in crypto companies, mostly in mining. Probably NFTs too, because they were morons.
naw, it goes wayy back, if you dig deeper - - earlier in the week, it was shown in court the bits of python code they had where they used a random number generator for the insurance fund (no kidding) - that piece of code went wayy back to 2019/ 2020, when Alameda was already losing $$$, which was the initial upstream loss that caused a cascade of suboptimal decisions - the genesis debacle was more downstream, which sank the whole thing - back in 2019/ 2020, which was reported as when Alameda was already losing $$ it was a raging bull market in bitcoin eg. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/6/23906899/ftx-alameda-sam-bankman-fried-trial-gary-wang-testimony