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- Madoff.
- Once chairman of NASDAQ. Ran a shop BLMIS (bernie L madoff investment securities) which had the two halves, market making and asset management. Turned the latter into a ponzi. Defrauded investors.
- Never registered as an investment advisor. Did BD.
- Reported fake losses.
- The trading side was legitimate. Used computers during the 70s to have a speed edge. Helped create PFOF.
- Ran a few floors of the lipstick building with the legitimate practices and had a whole separate floor for the shady stuff.
- The AM side would just take investor money and not invest it. They would report fake trades and fake P&L. Unlike the standard 2% carry fees and 20% perf fees, Madoff charged no fees – just commissions on every trade.
- I still don’t understand how investors didn’t notice anything fishy though? Or, more simply – why did placing your money with Madoff seem flashy at all? He was basically putting all of it into a bank with very low/steady returns, rather than investing it. How did no one probe the lackluster perf?
- Moved money between the market side and the investment side secretly. Just like ftx/alameda.
- Still appreciate the irony of the name Madoff.
- Auditors finally found that (1) the claimed trade histories did not match actuality on the exchanges (2) there was no counterparty documentation to confirm anything (3) totals were impossible (eg “purchased X options” but only X/2 options existed) etc etc.
- Sentenced to 150yrs in 2009 (life). Died in 2021, kidneys.
- Employed his whole family: wife Ruth (attempted suicide), sons Mark (hung himself) and Andrew (died lymphoma), brother Peter (prison) and niece Shana.
- Finished the netflix series. Overall just ok. Andrew Sorkin of NYT gives a lot of interviews. My old lex citadel office got a ton of screen time.
- The enron scandal was similar to FTX. Glaring accounting errors (in airquotes, because they were intentional), passed audits (that should have absolutely failed), fraud, etc. They were an energy company in Texas.
- Occupy Wall Street was 2011. This is the same as the 1% conversation. Protesting economic inequality.
- Lots of private work.
- Silvergate crypto bank down HUGE after 8.1b withdrawals.
- Psycopg is named for the expected – psychotic postgres adapter.
- I know every player in the top 30 live fide rankings except Vitiugov. Tata steel starts a week from saturday.
- ctrl-shift-p to open the vscode command palette. Then select whatever python interpreter you want. This gives syntax highlighting, pkg/env verification, etc. And then you can go to jupyter/ipykernel and select that exact python to use for notebooks as well.
- Remember that with poetry you don’t need a setup.py file. It will package your project. You still have to litter __init__.py into subpackages where necessary. You still have to define the setup.py params but in pyproject.toml. It installs your project into the env editably.
