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They bet big and they were wrong. It happens


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The investors who made the wrong bet lost a spectacular amount of capital.

If they lost it through bad bets, who was on the winning side of those bets?

Did they? I thought they made a heavy bet that hasn’t paid off (and maybe never will).

Right, so they got a much better deal than they usually would, didn't factor in a contingency, took a bet... and lost.

It was a brilliant $100m bet that backfired for no good reason.

You _are_ misunderstanding. They banked at SVB betting on higher returns than other safer options and lost that bet. They were only ever told they would get 250k of that bet back. Now they are whining about it.

They shouldn't have gambled more than they could afford to lose

Well, that's their loss for taking a gamble on it. Not everything is a sure bet, and even those that look like it might turn out not to be :)

In the words of Steve Eisman, “They mistook leverage for genius.”

Any big, overleveraged bet is going to go bad eventually, no matter how well researched.


Do you know what is a bet gone wrong? It is investment.

People who bet against it were careless.

The money was under evaluated by the BNS for years. This was bound to happen.


They were on the wrong side of a massive bet and lost.

Let's take the reverse and say they were on the right side of the bet and made millions and left everyone else behind to wallow relatively "poor".

Would they feel sorry for those who didn't take the bet?


They accepted the risk of losing $100m because they thought there was a significant chance of getting a much bigger return. Obviously in this case the bet didn't pay off, but putting 0.05% of the AUM in a high risk investment is hardly a scandal.

An ironic comment in a story about long-term bets going bad.

they took a gamble and lost, that's business != good riddance

They gambled on winning a lot of money on it.

So bet the correct way and make the financial payoff those people won't. What's the problem?

The real issue is that one made a bet on a future that didnt come true. The opposite could easily have happened too. Oil prices could have hit $1k a barrel and people in the suburbs would be crying about the $500 fill up.

It may have been a calculated "go big or go home" gamble.
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