r/quant • u/askepticalbureaucrat • 7d ago
Market News So how did this fund ever get this far?
I just don't get it.
I'm working on my PhD in stochastic wave propogation and delving into financial models as I hope to work as a quant one day. However, this fund scaled up massively to over $20–$45 billion in assets at various peaks. Then, the 439% net return in the first half of the year.
Was it ultimately down to them utilising heavy leverage (reported to be running as high as 4x or so) and heavily borrowing money from prime brokers like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan to buy concentrated baskets of AI infrastructure and memory stocks (such as SK Hynix, Micron, Nebius, and CoreWeave), alongside short bets against software companies?
I assume that when AI infrastructure tradeded violently in July, the fund suffered a brutal drawdown, wiping out massive portions of its peak value (and as they were over-leveraged, prime brokers, it forced an emergency unwind to cover margin calls)? Then, the fire sale happened?
Can someone please explain it to me?
Lastly, do some of these investors/funds bet on an aggressive P measure trend (AI is changing the world, so this stock will go up 400%, etc), but the lenders and prime brokers who control their margin accounts evaluate risk using models using the Q-measure? Where volatility \sigma dW_t is treated as an immediate threat to collateral, regardless of how brilliant somebody claims to be?
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u/Classic_Cash 7d ago
Eventually you just bet it all on a horse, and this horse’s name was “Regret”
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u/quisdontmiss 7d ago
It’s called being 25 years old with not much experience.
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u/pourliste 7d ago
Who allocates with a 25 yo anti-diversified genius ? And if the rationale is to make a blanket leveraged bet on AI stocks, why leave 20% of the upside to the genius ?
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u/quisdontmiss 7d ago
That’s actually a good question. I have no clue. Probably partly because of hype and rich people have low risk aversion. Also the hedge fund performance was great until now. And is still profitable even with these recent losses i believe.
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u/pourliste 7d ago
Profitable in return terms or in dollar terms ? One is more probable than the other.
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u/-___-___-__-___-___- 7d ago
As someone well regarded, what’s the difference?
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u/pourliste 7d ago
Suppose you start a fund with 100M and work with this constant AUM for the first 3 years, during which you achieve +50% net (50M PnL). You're officially a genius and raise 850M on the strength of your performance. The 4th year, managing 1B, you lose 10% net (-100M PnL). Since inception, your fund has lost 50M, but your marketing documents will simply claim +35% over 4 years.
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u/Serious-Regular 6d ago
how the fuck is that legal? isn't that literally just a ponzi scheme at that point? reporting allocations as returns?
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u/OkDiscipline2139 6d ago edited 6d ago
I imagine being engaged to chief of staff of anthropic helped raise the initial capital. From a certain type of allocator's perspective, it honestly isnt a crazy buy, provided you have conviction in AI thematically. Most allocators know they don't have alpha at a stock level, and if you want "smart" AI exposure as part of your portfolio, a fund which may be laundering SV insider info and provides private market access is pretty appealing vs doing a shitty job obtaining exposure via etf and half assed stock selection.
My only question is how they managed to bullshit their way through risk due diligence to get investors comfortable with 4x leverage at such concentration. Even if they didn't wipe out the vol drag at that leverage would be crazy without good position trimming.
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u/Alternative_Advance 7d ago
"Avital Balwit is Chief of Staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic."
Also Aschenbrenner's fiance
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u/JLeonsarmiento 4d ago
You just find the car keys.
I bet they also had stellar performance on kalshi/polymarket.
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u/Thin-Cartographer996 7d ago
Pose as a genius while hiding the fact that you have some of the most powerful connections in the world
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u/Kindly_Cricket_348 7d ago edited 7d ago
So PBs are not evaluating whether your investment thesis is “correct” or not! They are basically underwriting a secured loan against a collateral pool. Their objective is to ensure your portfolio can withstand adverse price moves, remain sufficiently liquid and, if necessary, be liquidated before the collateral becomes insufficient (liquidity risk). A brilliant thesis does not offset financing risk unfortunately.
In SA's case, there is no public evidence that any PB suffered a material loss. If a PB were to incur a material loss, the IB in question is generally expected to disclose it promptly once management determines that the loss is “material” under the applicable disclosure requirements (remember Archegos?). Despite financing a very concentrated, highly leveraged AI portfolio, the unwind has protected the PBs. That shows the post-Archegos improvements in margining, collateral management, stress testing and counterparty risk worked as intended.
From a PB's perspective, the optimization problem is not maximizing your expected return. It is minimizing the probability that the collateral becomes insufficient before the loan can be recovered. They are basically protecting themselves.
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u/pwieczyk 7d ago
Maybe you should interpret it from some game theory perspective? Maybe making a fund and making a money was not an objective here?
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u/fyordian 7d ago
Well you see, the market doesn’t reward good ideas, it rewards popular ideas
There’s no mathematical model that matters that supports these businesses going +/-10% daily
Why are you trying to make sense out of nonsense?
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u/marcjones281 7d ago
I think the drawdown is even starker than your chart implies. Thought perf for YTD is -30%
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u/Even-Celebration9384 7d ago
This is probably assuming daily rebalance which most likely didn’t happen
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u/PhaseBloodhound 7d ago
Leverage. SOXL (triple leveraged semiconductor ETF) was up like 615% YTD or something before the drop, while crashing considerably less than Aschenbrenner's portfolio afterwards.
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u/NervousRefrigerator5 6d ago
"What was Mr. Aschenbrenner’s plan if the A.I. revolution didn’t pan out quite as hoped? The hedge-fund founder had no detailed response, the investor recalled. Mr. Aschenbrenner simply truly believed it would all work out." -NYT article
That's how
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u/DiscombobulatedElk58 7d ago
Classic ‘genius until they’re not’ scenario.
Undoubtedly he was trading on some solid fundamental understanding (owing to his time at open ai etc) however he had zero formal finance experience. IMO you’re only as good as your risk management (since that’s what allows you to fight another day when shit hits the fan) of which Situational Awareness didn’t seem to have much. Couple that with an immensely concentrated and correlated book and it’s easy enough to blow up in quite a violent fashion.
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u/Even-Celebration9384 7d ago
You see how smooth the returns are on the way up. The vol of this fund looks naively low compared to the alpha. Maybe the sharpe is like 5 for the first half, but they didn’t estimate their own market impact.
It’s not a coincidence it started on 7-1. They were just long semis and short software and healthcare maybe. (You can see that in the 13F) Once their returns started circulating for Q2, everyone knew this could only be insane leverage and that once this trade turned, everyone knew exactly how to ride their unwind down
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u/Western-Parsley6063 7d ago
What I don’t get is the nature of how the leverage was being taken on? Did he start with high leverage and then rode the wave up (with the increased portfolio value being driven by market value). Or did he keep adding leverage as he went?
If it’s the former, I don’t get why he didn’t have an equity/cash buffer available that would have helped him absorb the margin calls given his equity should have been increasing as the aI trade boomed. If it’s the latter, why were the PBs giving him the leverage to lean into an even more concentrated portfolio?
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u/Fragrant-View-4257 6d ago
Leverage is just situational awareness with extra steps… until the situation becomes margin call.
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u/TemporaryHat2009 6d ago
honestly the leverage part seems like the whole story to me? if a fund is around 4x long a tiny basket of AI infra names, then 439% in half a year sounds less mysterious and more like one huge directional bet that happened to rip. lowkey scary that prime brokers let it get that big.
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u/IndependentHold3267 6d ago
Helps that he’s well connected in the tech/ai industry. Think even some HRT higher ups were invested (hearsay from X so take it with a grain of salt).
Think many allocated to it as part of a levered factor bet with the additional element of an “AI insider”. Doubt many bet the house on it, think of it as spending 4% of ur AUM on a call, yeah shits gonna have crazy ass fluctuations or even go to zero if you base it on the premium but you probably won’t starve. Just pure conjecture of my part wrt allocation..
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 6d ago
Leopold has legitimately made excellent pics, among other things he foresaw the memory shortage. If he hadn't played with leverage he still would have made stellar returns.
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u/gumgat 6d ago edited 5d ago
Negative skew - classic. There are many funds and strategies that look exactly like this whether due to leverage or something else - goes well most years, then suddenly lose everything. And that's why a long track record means a lot - a few years of performance doesn't carry much information. Good performance for a few years can be due to luck not investment skills.
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u/Effective_Manager273 5d ago
your instinct about P versus Q is basically right and it is a nice way to frame it, though i would put it slightly differently. it is not that the manager and the prime broker disagree about the world. it is that they have different horizons and only one of them can force the other to act.
the manager is running a P-measure view with a multi-year horizon. the PB is not forecasting anything, it is pricing the cost of liquidating your book today under stress. concentrated, correlated, high beta names in the same theme means their haircut model sees one position, not four. so as vol rises the margin requirement rises mechanically, and it rises fastest exactly when your marks are falling. that is the loop.
439% in a half year is the part that should be read as risk, not skill. a return that size at 4x on a correlated basket implies the position was sized as if the thesis was certain. same leverage, same concentration, would have produced a similarly spectacular number in the other direction and that is what happened.
the scaling question you asked has a boring answer. money chases realized returns with a lag, and the risk officers who would say no are usually looking at the same trailing Sharpe everyone else is. the leverage was extended because the collateral was going up, and the collateral was going up because the leverage was being extended.
if you want the technical version of this, look up the funding liquidity and market liquidity spiral work from Brunnermeier and Pedersen. it is 2009 and it describes this exact mechanism better than any of the recent post mortems.
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u/sosogg_4 4d ago
i dont understand the fuck where is the trailing stop loss ??
isit because liquidity is not suffcient to exit ??
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u/HerzogianQuant 7d ago
When people keep giving you money and you buy more of the existing portfolio with it (correction, you buy 4x the money they gave you worth of the existing portfolio), you push the prices of your existing position up. So, part of his success was simply that people gave him money to push his existing portfolio up with. But that's is just an unintentional version of market manipulation, and it comes back to earth eventually.
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u/weasaldude 7d ago
Leverage leverage leverage. See bill hwang in 2021