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Discussion Sentiment
70% Positive
Analyzed from 2198 words in the discussion.
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#fund#money#situational#citadel#awareness#hedge#more#margin#down#someone
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 2198 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (102 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Ironically, I would describe this selloff as an increase in situational awareness.
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!
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge...
They were open about their gains. It was the margin calls and illiquidity that got them, not going negative. Some of their assets, like Anthropic stock, isn’t worthless, it’s just illiquid.
Though you cannot be pardoned from civil stuff, and the options to actually prosecute are pretty slim, so I doubt it.
Though, even if this is just tongue-in-cheek, you can literally buy a pardon in America right now with just a little bit a money into the pockets of the Trump family, in case you didn't get the joke (that the US government is literally pro-corruption right now).
The guy really really really wants to end up in prison, lol.
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.
let's be clear here - he didn't actually "lose" a ton of money. he was up 439% net in the first half of 2026.
his issue was getting margin called due to being short on software (which went up) and long on AI infra (which went down) - getting margin called != losing money.
He's down 67% on the month. He most certainly lost alot of money.
He'll be fine and i think he'll be successful at raising more money, and he's still up on the year as far as I've been told by LP's, but he sure did lose alot of money this month.
The only thing you can argue is realized vs unrealized.
I would be very interested to know what he did with the management and performance fees (and how much they were) he gathered over the last 3 years. Just the perf fees from 2025 are probably enough to set him up for life. If he reinvested not so great.
I mean, I'm pretty sure he pocketed the money and got richer. Most hedge fund compensation structure has always (ironically, I'd add, given the name "hedge" fund) incentivized volatility over long term performance.
Denials mean nothing.
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.
A barometer of the mania and one for the history books. A 23 year old wunder-kind publishes a 156 page prophesy with a catchy title which was lapped up by the silicon valley elite and funded to the tune of 10s of Billions. And, not sticking to his lane, the wunder-kind enters the finance world thinking his brilliance translates there too, and he was promptly taken to the woodshed by the wall street sharks.
A lot of debris waiting to happen in data-center debt for sure. The next several years are going to be interesting with more of these type of blowups. This is a canary in the ai-wreck coalmine.
These hedge funds get wound up in complicated, leveraged, illiquid layered stacks of (often private) investment vehicles that go from highly profitable to financial nuke overnight. Thats how they just get wiped out while everyone else just has a bad day.
Spectacular blowup and a lesson on leverage, but let's not miss this line.
Anyone who's done any amount of investment can see this through the lens of history and I'm right there with you. This is the Lehman Brothers stage of the game and SA could be that "one". But Bro, we're still up 80%! - even WSB isn't filled with this level of ignorance.
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.
Martin Shkreli breaks down the collapse of Situational Awareness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49119380
Edit: added context
If you've a better source, share it; I'll have a look and might use that one in the future. Otherwise, if you can't contribute in a constructive manner, stop making baseless comments about others intention without understanding them first.
The arguments against him barely hold water in general anyway.
His investor literacy youtube backlog is unusually deep and as of yet has only shilled his own trading product.
But your point is valid, he will never live down the fraud conviction and his face is so punchable.
he's a relatively well known figure in finance and pharma investing
Edit: I don't do podcasts but this is absolutely worth some of your time to watch.
80% return is still excellent.
> 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.
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.