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- [00:00]
Interviewer
Let's bring in Martin Shkreli to break it down for us. I believe he's here. How are you doing, Martin? Good to see you again.
- [00:06]
Martin Shkreli
Hey guys, I'm doing great. How are you?
- [00:08]
Interviewer
Perfect, perfect.
- [00:11]
Co-Host
How's your last?
- [00:12]
Interviewer
Take us through it.
- [00:13]
Co-Host
24 hours.
- [00:13]
Interviewer
24 hours been like for you?
- [00:15]
Martin Shkreli
It's, it's been interesting. I do invest myself, so it's been a, it's been a probably one of the craziest months in Wall street history. I was talking to some friends last night about Long Term Capital Management, Amaranth, other famous liquidity driven blow ups and this is up there. And yeah, it's just a really crazy thing. We had heard rumors sort of mid last week and then they really started crystallizing last night and this morning. Obviously sort of a fait accompli. And I actually think they did a wonderful job of keeping it relatively quiet. I think some players were already positioning say early in the week, Monday, Tuesday, looking to do what my old boss Kramer used to call, you know, shooting against a fund. So if you know somebody has to liquidate, the best thing for you to do. Unfortunately, sadly, Darwinian is to go sell all the positions you have in common and go start shorting everything they have.
- [01:17]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [01:18]
Martin Shkreli
And it accelerates the, the sort of downfall as quickly as you can. And this is a very common practice when these things happen. Certainly not something I had overlap decisions with them. So certainly nothing I would do but know a wide number of funds that were shorting all of these stocks hoping to cause a panic and a crash.
- [01:37]
Interviewer
How do you trace back the start of this correction? Is it the war? Is it oil? Is it jitters around open source or just hyperscaler? Capex. There's so many different narratives around why the AI infrastructure trade. The bottleneck trade might be weakening. At the same time it feels like there's some really solid progress and the models are progressing along like pretty like as expected.
- [02:04]
Co-Host
Yeah. Yeah. You have the labs having some of the best months in business history of any companies ever.
- [02:11]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [02:12]
Co-Host
But then all the infrastructure correcting.
- [02:14]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah, none of that stuff matters. The only thing that matters is the propensity of the buyer and seller to buy or sell. And what you had happen was the smart guys get in early, start buying, see the prices go up, buy some more, and then less smart guys take note and say I want to do that. I want to be up 400% this year too. Guys like me started buying right near the top, like, hey, this is great. I love memory. I love bottlenecks and, and then, but, but the weakest hands are buying at the top. So they're also the first to sell.
- [02:52]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [02:53]
Martin Shkreli
The first to panic.
- [02:54]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [02:54]
Martin Shkreli
And it just creates this like, you know, every bubble sort of the same. You have this euphoria, this peak, and then, you know, everyone sort of panics at once. You know, the fundamentals basically don't make a difference. You know, I think they, they sort of drive the marginal buyer and seller. But the 80 or 90% of the assets, shareholders don't change hands. It's that 5% of the margin that's deciding the price. And if that 5% is in the state where they're levered up 3x, there are 4x. As we heard, SALP was a forex levered fund, which is. That's a lot of leverage. A 25% drawdown takes you out of business. Interestingly, we heard that three firms were bidding on the assets. So Jane Street, Millennium and Citadel were sort of brought in a closed, closed circle sort of late Friday to, to bid on the remains of the firm. And we got offered a look at $100 million of anthropic stock, which we were puzzled, puzzled by. You know, sometimes you see these SPVs sort of interest comes across, you know, here and there. And we thought that was interesting. I sort of raised my eyebrow and it's like, is that Leopold is. Because, you know, sometimes when you want to sell $4 billion or something, you don't come out and say you want to sell 4 billion. Yeah, you come out and you say you want to sell $100 million of it. And usually a guy who wants to buy 100 is enough to buy 500 or more. And you sort of fill them out and say, here's 100. Okay, do you want five by any chance? And then, you know, your eyebrow starts to raise a little bit that, you know, maybe he's got even more. Now, of course, this is a really odd situation. So we heard Millennium did put in a bid. Citadel's bid was better. You know, I think Ken wants to be the guy that everyone goes to when they're in trouble. And that's the, you know, Buffett is getting older. It's not the kind of stuff Buffett wants to do anyway. But, you know, Citadel did this in the Amaranth deal. You know, when Amaranth blew up natural gas futures, I think Citadel took that portfolio and virtually every blow up in finance.
- [05:03]
Co-Host
Enron. Enron, where they just raided all the talent.
- [05:07]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah, they wanted to do it. Enron as well. I Think, yeah, they just sort of, Ken is very smart guy, sort of shows up and says, you know, how can I, you know, how can I you know be a partner to the Goldmans and the bank of America's when they need to get out, you know, of a really risky position they basically take and take over the book. Right. So if you, I'll give you sort of an example. You're asking the question. So let's say you know, you're at 45 billion, you know, sort of try to trace this back and your, your you know, 10 billion of that is in anthropic from what we understood. So you have $30 billion of cash in your bank account and running forex leverage means you have 120 billion gross market value. So if your GMV drops I don't know, 25%, that doesn't sound so bad. At 120 billion maybe that's I don't know, 30 billion. So you're down to 90 billion. But that's not your equity. So your equity drops from 35 billion to 5 billion. And no prime broker is going to let you keep 90 billion of gross market value because once you dip your equity below zero it's their loss, not yours and they're not going to lose a penny after Archegos and after these other kind of blow ups. That's not their job. And they kind of have the right to take over your portfolio which is sort of something I hope nobody ever has to experience. But they basically call you in and say listen, these are our assets. Now we're going to decide what their disposition is going to be. And the rumor is over the weekend he contacted about 10 parties to place anthropic in an effort to shore up liquidity. Selling the anthropic stake for, for allegedly the offer was at 1.1 trillion equivalent market cap which you know is I think roughly where it's trading. And you know, it's unclear whether that was sold or half of it was sold is what we reported that that half of it was sold. It's still a little unclear who bought that, what's happening exactly. But that's, that's the best we've got. And then you know, when it came to the public, you know, book, it does sound like, you know, the buyer of that book basically got a, from what we were told a 3 to 4 billion dollars insta markup. So they basically now have to work them, they have to work out of 3 to 4 billion, more than 3 to 4 billion, quite a lot more. But in essence, if they work out of these positions without disrupting the market, they'll printed 3 to 4 billion on the trade, which is unusual and interesting trade, but really exciting. One of the parties reached out to me last night, one of these three parties, interestingly, after my reporting, and they said that in essence, at some substance, yes, Leopold flew a little too close to the sun and your numbers are, are a little off. And I asked what direction and they wouldn't, they wouldn't confirm or deny. I received a lot of pushback on the reporting to your point, privately and publicly, that, that it's not so bad and that, you know, he's only down 30%. 30% you can kind of live with. But also if anthropic hasn't changed its mark, that means you were down 60 in the public book. And if you're forex levered, you know, that means you're sort of down keen on the public book, which sounds too good to be true. If you're trading these stocks, they were down like 15% a day.
- [08:39]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [08:39]
Martin Shkreli
So we've also heard the other AI funds are hurting, maybe not as much as in trouble, but, but certainly hurting as well.
- [08:47]
Interviewer
Where does the fund go?
- [08:49]
Co-Host
He gives him good, he gives some good cover to all the funds that were effectively copy trading him.
- [08:53]
Interviewer
Oh, sure.
- [08:54]
Co-Host
Maybe even being more risk on and later to these positions because they were, they're naturally just late. If you're trying to copy trade someone and you're trying to catch up, you know, you're trying to catch up, more leverage, you're coming into these trades way later. Do you, do you recall, like, how did you process Ryan Jacob in around the year 2000, because you were at Kramer's firm, I believe you joined maybe right before the Ryan Internet fund started collapsing.
- [09:30]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah. There's also the Amarin fund. There was a fund in the 60s called the Manhattan Fund that Warren Buffett criticized for being the Go Go, kind of like the fund was run by a guy named Gerald Tsai. And so like every generation, you've seen the memes about Kathy, you know, every generation has it. You know, the guy that believes in that cycle and goes balls to the walls on that cycle. And look, I have a lot of respect for somebody who's willing to do that. I used to tell a friend who kind of did the same thing. He followed this trade, but it was very early. So he had sort of Leopold like numbers and he sort of did hedge it at what sounds like close to the top. So sort of a miracle trader. Best Trader. I know and I joked with him, I said, you know, if Leopold sells at the top and turns short like I will absolutely adulate him as the greatest of all time. It's just that, you know, usually when you're so spellbound by that narrative of whatever happening, in this case AGI, you know, there are people out there that say, look, AGI is here, slash coming when it comes, the entirety of finance is not relevant anymore. Yeah, you know, we might as well just run it up and kind of see the end of days this way. And of course there's some guy sitting on a trading desk at Goldman Sachs. You're like, these people are nut. You know, it's just the stock market.
- [10:53]
Co-Host
Did you, given, given that Leopold had, had been at FTX right up until the, the, the, the fall, did you think that maybe as, as risk on as he was like, maybe he was like, you know what? I just, I can't go through that again. He wasn't necessarily, he wasn't necessarily directly tied to any of this sort of nefarious activity at ftx, but he did have to viscerally experience it and I believe resign the day of the collapse. And yeah, I would, I just was expected to not like. Yeah, to run it back like so quickly. You would, you would expect even like, you know, yeah, go and do it, have a normal, you know, great career for a decade, whatever. Then maybe come back to leverage and be like, I'm ready to dance again.
- [11:41]
Martin Shkreli
But there's a lot of questions. Like one question is what's his carry? A lot of firms in the hedge fund industry, believe it or not, they have clawback provisions for carry, like high water mark provisions.
- [11:53]
Interviewer
Right. So you have to clear something.
- [11:55]
Martin Shkreli
Everyone has a high watermark. But what's increasingly happened is a carry provision where you have to return the 2 and 20 you earned if you have a severe drawdown, which could actually end up being a tough situation. Now as you guys know, the fellow is getting, getting married this weekend as well, which is, you know, a little bit of tragedy with a little bit of triumph mixed in. But obviously, you know, when this, but does every.
- [12:22]
Co-Host
How common are those clawback clauses? Because you have to imagine in this fundraise he had like massive, massive leverage.
- [12:29]
Interviewer
You know, like demand was very high.
- [12:32]
Co-Host
Demand was very high. That feels like a term.
- [12:34]
Interviewer
The numbers were so good.
- [12:35]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah, it's a more institutional thing. And you know, speaking of which, you know, obviously the guy basically had no experience and again, you know, in times like this, nobody wants to grave dance. And I'M not doing that. But I had some institutional friends, one of the biggest fund of funds in New York for example, who passed on Leopold, basically laughed at him and said, you know, there's no way I could invest in this. And of course, you know, he goes on this tear, you know, makes like 20x or whatever it was since inception and does fantastic and he feels sort of sheepish but ultimately you know, somewhat vindicated after all of this. So you did have a manager that had no experience kind of along only or extremely long biased starts to do privates, which for many hedge funds is kind of the death knell, you know. You know, when hedge funds put on their VC cap and try to try to do what those guys do, it often doesn't end well. And that goes back like you know, 50 years basically of hedge fund history and very few people have been able to do both. And the other thing I'd point out is we're going to see July numbers very soon here from, from quite a lot of hedge funds that I think we're in the same trade.
- [13:44]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [13:44]
Martin Shkreli
And so this, this is not just Leopold's 100 billion gross. It's like that times maybe 5 or 10 and the market, while the market's liquid but that's a lot of downward pressure in a few weeks and you know, it's amazing to see this all compressed in a month. Whereas like the dot com bubble took three or four years to patiently go up and patiently go down. Seeing that compress instantly is interesting. What's going to happen next is really going to be fascinating. There's some theory out there that we see all time highs again now that all this liquidity is out. There's other theories there that we actually were just having this nice big downtrend and that this liquidity pop will fade and we'll be back down further and further. You know, nobody knows what will happen. But it's certainly while you're right that you know, the anthropics and OpenAI's are having record business results. So is Microsoft and Google and Meta for that matter. There's still, I think some more discerning questions about is or is this capex investment worth it? You know, they rewarded Microsoft for being prudent, they punished Metta and Google for not being prudent. So one wonders what the future will bring there. But yeah, about as crazy as things have gotten on Wall street in many years, probably at least since FTX and certainly crazier than the sort of Tigersoft bank venture boom of 21 and then really since then, the await insanity. So it's quite a spectacle. And I think no matter how much people want to learn the lesson of leverage, over and over and over again, we all seem to repeat it. And you know, it is what it is. But I think that the Jane, the Jane Citadel Millennium, kind of like entire hedge fund complex sort of becoming this like, shadow bank is quite interesting, you know, in that like these guys are, are sort of there to. Normally the banks would sort of take this on the chin, but now that there's other folks who are like, you know, Jane was an lp, for example, and reportedly was not interested in bidding, which is fascinating. May have taken the anthropic, however, really unclear. We're going to learn more obviously as some days go on here, but it's, it's an unprecedented time and you know, really an insane story that may just get more insane as we learn more.
- [15:58]
Interviewer
Is there a world where the fund continues? Because I'm just hearing the numbers and it's like, you know, for up at 45 billion, the actual money into the fund was maybe 5 billion or something. If you sell the positions, there's a world where you, you wind up with like 10 billion in a bank account. And the LPs are like, well, we gave you five. Keep going, get back in the game.
- [16:22]
Martin Shkreli
You know, I hope that's the case for the LPs, who are awesome, for the fund manager, who obviously got quite a lot of whiplash. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, there's this concept on the street, as you guys know, like, once there's blood in the water, like, these positions would go to zero. Like, we'll send Micron to $5, you know, just to eliminate this guy at three. Right. Like, that's, you know, the craziest thing is, like, that's, that's the nature of Wall street when this happens and there's a guy that has to sell 100 billion, you'll have a trillion dollars in front of him. Just like, you know, let's, let's see this guy cry uncle. And it's the saddest, kind of most Machiavellian thing, but like, he had, he sort of had to blow up, you know, there was no other ending, sadly.
- [17:07]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [17:08]
Martin Shkreli
Because of the leverage level. It's just like one slight. You know, I remember my old, my old boss was a tiger portfolio manager. Reminded me of the 2000 era, where there's this very slight change in tone from one optical component supplier. And that's like him and his partner from Soros just decided to go like as short as they could because they knew ultimately these vulnerable hands were sort of sitting there. After the easy part of the bubble was over, you had this like, okay, what's next? Things have to get a lot crazier. You saw Dwar Cash's tweet. Things like that would have to sort of happen for there to be enough second derivative for somebody to be surprised. Yeah, you know, everyone knows AI ise in this boom. Everyone knows chips are in this boom. What could possibly shock you to the upside? Not much. So if you hear any little like, you know, we're not going to spend as much, the whole shit hits the fan and every. It's just too heavy. So I actually wonder if we're, you know, if we're not in for a longer, more protracted decline. Things feel great today. You know, you have this huge boom, this relief rally. A lot of the froth is out of the system. But you know, what next? I don't know that a patient and calm market is going to emerge because you had the hyperscalers and the big companies, they fomoed too. They fomo just as hard as Leopold did. Right. If not harder. So this isn't just him. It's the whole world collectively saying, fuck, I got to go all in. And AI and it's, it's. And who, who had the guts, you know, other than one man, Tim Cook in the back saying, do nothing, you know.
- [18:44]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. No, really. Yeah, yeah.
- [18:49]
Co-Host
The funny thing, you know, we had been joking. We were joking in like Q4 when, you know, they're prior to like coding agents really starting to rip. You know, OpenAI revenue growth had like slowed a little bit and like there was some jitters and, and a lot of this stuff wasn't public at the time, but you could tell some of the kind of crossover types were like getting a little nervous. Right.
- [19:14]
Martin Shkreli
They kind of expected MAU dau numbers.
- [19:17]
Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [19:18]
Martin Shkreli
Really plateaued.
- [19:19]
Co-Host
And then we, and then there was a correction. Like there was like briefly, you know, for a period. It was probably like eight weeks. It was like, okay, like. And then it started ripping again and we were taking like a sort of a, a bit of a joking like victory lap, being like cool, like AI corrected, you know, bubble pop.
- [19:40]
Interviewer
We're able to build back sustainably. We're good from here on out. It's smooth sailing. No, I completely agree.
- [19:47]
Martin Shkreli
I think the most unexpected thing would be if we saw brand new all time highs for the entire thing. I think Almost everyone on Wall street is skeptical this will happen, which means it has a chance of bullet.
- [20:00]
Co-Host
So you're saying there's a chance.
- [20:02]
Interviewer
I love it. Can you, can you give me a little bit more insider baseball on what it takes to unwind a big position as a shareholder? Because a lot of people who are not inside the hedge fund world are sort of maybe confused around, okay, yeah, you own $50 million of a $1 billion chip stock. Can't you just dump that on retail? Can't you just, like, sell markets, sell that on E Trade or Robinhood? And in fact, it's much more complicated when you're at this level. Even though it's public markets, there's not just a big button. Can you walk us through what it actually takes to, like, sell a big position when you're at that level?
- [20:48]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah, there's. There's a lot that goes into it, interestingly. So the first is you have this advertisement system. So if you sell into the. Into the market, you can try that and those. That's called selling into the screens. The screens are the numbers on your screen. Anybody could buy and sell Robinhood, whatever. So you don't normally do that. If you, if you can help it, selling on screens is at least somewhat quiet. You can just sort of trickle out. There's always this conspiracy that as I'm selling on the screens, there's some guy who can see my screen, and he's like, this guy's got a vwap market order to sell 10 million shares. That's like, you know, I'm going to tell somebody. And that knowledge would be very, very powerful. And there's even some even crazier conspiracies out there that quants could actually use different. All kinds of insane ideas around what they can do to sort of sniff out that this is happening. So there's people that are scared of that. Then you can pick up the phone and this is the way you normally do it. And you call Goldman and you say, listen, I need to sell 5, you know, 5 million shares of Microsoft or something like that. And they say, you know, should we take it or do we find a guy that wants to take it and they'll sort of try to decide. Now, Microsoft is easy. If you're trying to sell Sharon I a new cloud in Australia that nobody wants, that's a tough one. And you own like, ten days of volume. So if you try to hit the screens, you have 10 days of volume. You have to be the entire volume for 10 days before you'd be out, you'd probably take the stock down 50% or more. And you don't want to do that. So you try to do this advertisement process and you basically can post in the stock market that you are a seller of a stock and you can post that your four digit, what's called market maker id. So Goldman's is gseo. So GSEO would be a seller of say, Nevius, which was one of his positions you'd call up. You'd say, okay, Goldman, I'm a client too, of Goldman. What do you got on Nebius? And the guy would say, listen, we got a pretty big seller here, you know, and say, how big? You know, half a million shares. And you say, a lot bigger, you know. So you'd say, okay, because they have to advertise that, you know, they're working your order. So they have to sort of tell people that there's a seller. They kind of are trying to be coy about how big, but they're not going to waste somebody's time either. So the guy who's heard that there's a big seller, well, he might turn around. He's not supposed to do this. He sort of might turn around and say, if there's a huge seller of Nebius out there and I'm just a little baby fish, maybe I could short 50,000 shares and get in front of this guy. If you're an actual interested buyer, you might also still be nervous because you'd say, well, if he's really got a ton of size, I might have to be judicious about how I step in. If you combine that with the pressure in the market and you add it all up. And then usually what you do is you'd have say, oh, I know a guy that works there and let's see if he's returning calls. And you know, when you hit up the guy and he's not on Bloomberg, he's hard to reach. It's kind of like, well, it sounds like it could be them selling. So it's not too many people that own that many shares of that security. So you look at the holders list and you're sort of like, who could it be selling 10 million shares? So you call Fidelity and they say, no, we're not selling. You call the next guy. No, we're not selling. Next guy's an etf. Next guy's index fund. It's got to be him if it's them. And then you start noticing all their positions are down. It gets really hard. Ultimately, the bank decides because you might say I don't want to sell. The bank says I don't care what you want, we're selling regardless. Goldman Sachs is not in the business of holding AI stocks. We're going to sell at any price we can because our board would rather know for sure that we're down a billion and just take the rip the band aid off than to wonder if we could lose 50. And so it's Goldman's position that we're just going to just cut the arm off right now before it metastasizes. And so they'll do a fire sale and of course Goldman smart they're going to reach out to a guy like Citadel or somebody else to place it carefully. But selling the whole portfolio in one shot was a very smart move. Now again we've heard the discount could have been as big as 20 to 50% which is mouth watering discount to buy some quality companies at. But to end it and have finality what was really to answer the question finally what you really needed to do is the buyer of these stocks has to have the liquidity to hold them for five years and do nothing. Because the market guys like me and to a very small extent and guys much bigger will sit there and say I don't think you can hold this. And they'll start shorting it and shorting it and shorting and trying to make you cry uncle Kyosha. In Japan, one of Leopold's holdings, also mine, is trading at 3 times earnings. You know they basically forced you, you're forcing the guy to, to really, you know, to sell. And if you're going to hold this stock you have to make sure that you can hold it until it's 2 times earnings or 1 time servings. And the only player big enough and more powerful enough to sort of hold $100 billion and not blink is somebody like a Citadel. And even still some keep the rumors out there. They're the people who are going to try to rush your Citadel, which I wouldn't advise but something like that where maybe they'll now have to suffer the same contagion. So it's a very crazy time in the markets and I don't think we've seen everything yet because I do think there are some large tech funds that have had the same trade on. I do think liquidation is over thankfully. But I do think that there are some funds that are about to be found out to be down 30% or down 40% or something.
- [26:19]
Interviewer
Take me through the mind of Ken Griffin like a couple of weeks ago, there's this rumor that he was sort of like pushing or signaling that there might be a rate hike. But what I'm interested in is if you suspect that there's going to be a fire sale on X, Y and Z companies. Is there a world where you build the hedges before you acquire those assets, or is that two 4D chess? Because that if they, if they wind up acquiring these for 50%, 20% off, but they already have offsets, then they sort of come in market neutral. Is that possible?
- [26:56]
Martin Shkreli
I don't think so. So I'm familiar with the Citadel's performance for this month, which is surprisingly up. So I think they're probably one of the only hedge funds in the world. This month it's up.
- [27:06]
Co-Host
So they are very small.
- [27:07]
Martin Shkreli
Very small.
- [27:08]
Co-Host
They were actually hedged is what you're saying.
- [27:10]
Martin Shkreli
Yes. They have a diverse platform of different businesses. A guy trading weather, a guy trading rates, a guy trading stocks, you know, about a thousand guys trading stocks. And they have a computer fund called Citadel securities that is a market maker that trades a good chunk of the volume of every instrument of the world. And ultimately, I think that the prime brokers, the Goldmans and Bank of America's, they do so much business with Citadel and they've done this before where they know who to go to. Just the same way the US Government went to Warren Buffett when they wanted to shore up Goldman, they know that the right person to call is Ken, and he is really going out of his way to make himself the guy to call. And I think that is a great brand because you may not need to be that guy more than once every decade. But look, once a decade to make a free 5 billion or 10 billion, it's a great guy, B. And you know, it's sort of like he becomes a dependable trusted partner to these banks. And if he wants something from the banks, he's helped them because without him, they might have had to sell that at a negative number. In fact, some people think. I don't think this is what happened, but some people actually think the equity in Leopold's prime brokerage accounts went negative.
- [28:24]
Interviewer
Okay.
- [28:25]
Martin Shkreli
Which I think is, you know, something that again, gold. The Goldmans and Bank of America is try to stop you before you get there.
- [28:32]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [28:33]
Martin Shkreli
But, you know, they also don't want to sell, like I said, share in AI, which is an illiquid, tough to sell security.
- [28:38]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [28:38]
Martin Shkreli
You know, they'll sell out your micron very fast or you'll sell it out before then. But if you're Left holding this bag of like a liquid crap that you have 60 days of volume to get out of. It's pretty tough to sit there and tell your prime broker, don't worry. Which is why again, I think he needed cash. Probably somebody on Monday or Tuesday tapped them on the shoulder and said your margins looking a little thin. You know, can. You can add, you know, a couple of billion here or more. And things happen so quickly that there was just no time. And yeah, it's. I think, I think Citadel learned about this at the 11th hour as every. As you're supposed to. You know, the firm didn't leak out that they were hurting. They didn't have to my knowledge, daily performance. In fact, from what I'm told, situational awareness as a young hedge fund was not so great with communication. Not surprising especially with monthly and quarterly letters could have been more timely on some of those. So it's small group of a couple of guys. So I don't.
- [29:37]
Co-Host
Yeah.
- [29:37]
Martin Shkreli
That this was the same.
- [29:38]
Co-Host
You rewind. What was it only a month ago that the or 13F was late. 13F was like late. And everyone was saying like he sold everything work out. Did he work out some kind of deal to get it confidential. But it, it sounded like you just like didn't get around to it. They had other priorities maybe.
- [29:57]
Martin Shkreli
Do you think you can mentioned.
- [29:59]
Co-Host
Do you think you can rebuild a career as a venture investor? Because like in venture you just, you're just like gig along always. Like it's like, you know, one of the few forms of investing where it's just so hard to get out of positions. That's the thing.
- [30:14]
Martin Shkreli
I mean, why become a hedge fund manager? I have a friend who wants to start. I have a friend who wants to start a hedge fund. I told him this is the most painful, horrible business in the world. Why to do this. And if you start a newsletter business that makes 100 million a year, even 50 million a year of revenue, you've done better than almost every hatchet on the planet. Like you do not want to do this job. And the reason, you know, the reason people do it and I did it too, and I would never do it again is it's the sexiest thing in the world. You think you're, you know, is incredible.
- [30:47]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [30:47]
Martin Shkreli
You're the master of the universe. And I had friends of wanting to quit really high profile jobs to be a hedge fund. I was just like, you're out of your mind. You don't know what, what this job is. It's waking up at 3am check in Korean stock prices and, you know, waking up back up at 6, you know, wondering what's, what's happening in the world, stuff like this. And there's absolutely no productive thing you're doing. You know, you're providing capital, you know, other than that, you know, you're really playing this high stakes crazy poker game. And, you know, it's certainly fun and interesting, but when it's painful and raw, you know, I hope he'll, he'll do something. You know, he's a brilliant person, really. People like that. I mean, look, Peter Thiel had a hedge fund that didn't quite have this level of liquidation or anything like that, but it had a rough last few years. Thiel was able to obviously not only continue his venture investing efforts, creating one of the biggest funds of all time, one of the most successful funds of all time. Investing personally, doing amazing. Also getting back into macro trading with Teal Macro, which supposedly has done well. I do think there is this period of a few years that, you know, he can reset and take the learnings, take whatever talent and skill and certainly genius, that nobody denies that he's a brilliant guy and rebuild. I don't think it's the end at all. And I hope he's keeping like that even temperament about this because, you know, I think a lot of people respect him quite a lot. No matter how this turned out, you know, he'll be back and successful. But it is a little bit of a humiliation thing that I think most people on Twitter and other places are sort of saying, well, the market tends to humble you. And this is like an extremely humbling moment from being just two months separated from the biggest hedge fund on planet Earth and most successful to being forced to sort of liquidate. That is quite a rapid sort of reversal.
- [32:38]
Co-Host
Also just imagining what the fund looks like in two or three years if you just survive. Right. I can, you know, he, you know, there was a clip that was circulating yesterday from his, you know, appearance on Door Cash where he's like, oh, there's obviously like 100x, you know, left before AGI, right. So like he was like up, you know, 20x or whatever, thinking like, I got, I got so much room to run, but just couldn't stay in the game.
- [33:07]
Martin Shkreli
I gotta say, extrapolating, there's always a risk.
- [33:12]
Co-Host
Yeah. I gotta say, it felt like a, felt like a huge moment for you and your business. Just because everyone, the whole finance world was learning about this situation from your posts. I'm sure a lot of people were glued to your terminal. And it felt like a changing of the guard, because again, you were getting pushback. You were getting some pushback. But then two hours later, it was like Financial Times, Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, they're all kind of. Clearly, they needed a couple hours to, like, run it down, but you got to it first. And. Yeah, I was. I was quite impressed.
- [33:48]
Martin Shkreli
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we've talked about this in the past. I mean, there is a change in the guard. You guys helped change the guard in your space. And I think that, you know, the folks at the Journal, the folks at Bloomberg folks, these other companies, they're fantastic reporters, but they're not active or former players. And, you know, we will hear. We will always hear things before them because. Especially on the street, because that's just.
- [34:14]
Co-Host
Well, and the crazy. The craziest thing is you. You actually waited until it was like, over effectively to share. Right. Like, you had been hearing about this.
- [34:24]
Martin Shkreli
There's a lot.
- [34:26]
Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we've been in that position, like, hundreds of years times where it's not appropriate to share anything. And sometimes you're sitting there being like, I'm really surprised that, like, legacy media hasn't picked up on this story. It feels like it's just common knowledge and there's. There's a. Definitely a time and place to just not. Not say anything and. And let something work its way through the system.
- [34:48]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah. I mean, to give the devil their due, the information is also quite good at, you know, this type of thing, and they are particularly good at scoops on open AI. But the. Which I still haven't unraveled. How. How. But they're obviously very good reporters. But a reporter at a place like that and trad media, they generally don't care about burning bridges and resources or contacts, so they want that news out yesterday. You know, I do care, and it also is a conflict of interest because I don't want to hurt somebody that's given me good information and betray their confidence, because I have to keep the confidence of these folks if I want to keep talking to them. But I also, in the case of this situation, as the carnage is unfolding, you know, there's sort of balancing the need for everyone to know with the need for, you know, protecting friendships and relationships. You have to make that judgment call each time. And I hope that our customers understand that there will be things that we know before others we can't disclose because we want to protect folks in particular friends. Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, they'll never do that. They're always going to serve their customer, who is the reader. We can't necessarily do that. You probably know things about a litany like you said hundreds of times, different fundraisers going on different things like that. And we have to all keep our lips closed because that will be the last time we hear about a fundraiser. And I think that this was a situation where it sort of merited discussion. It was going to happen momentarily anyway. I, in fact, to your, to your point, the thing that got me to publish was my friend saying, everyone is hearing this now. Once that happened, I said, all right, well, you know, it's time to, I can let the cat out of the bag. It's about to be let out anyway. So.
- [36:32]
Interviewer
Yeah. I have two more quick questions if you have a minute. One is just about how leverage works at a hedge fund. I think, you know, again, from the retail perspective, from the much smaller player, you might know that you can go to a, you know, a brokerage and get a little bit of leverage. But what does the process look like as you're scaling into the tens of billions of leverage? At certain point you have to go to all of the banks, certain banks who's actually like, what is that process to get leverage at that scale actually look like?
- [37:09]
Co-Host
And also let's, let's appreciate for them for a moment that I feel like just a month ago the west coast broadly was taking this insane victory lap, being like the west coast has eaten Wall street. Like the best and biggest hedge fund is no longer on the East Coast. Like we just have everything now, finance and technology, and then just deeply humbled within the span of 30 days. And it turns out, turns out you guys over there, you know a thing or two and here we are asking you so how would one go about getting.
- [37:48]
Martin Shkreli
So one of the things that I think is not well understood is the prime broker make a spread on, I think the somewhat understood is they make, they make their business to make a spread on financing. So if you go to a prime broker and say, I'm never going to use leverage, never, they say, I'm never going to use leverage and I'm never going to really trade a lot with, with, with your firm, you're just going to sit there and say, like, we'll still take the assets because we can re. Hypothecate them and lend them to the guys that are going to take leverage, but in general that's not a great customer. So if they're making a 1% spread, which is actually, is Relatively huge amount. And you're borrowing Forex, you're actually giving them 400 basis points of free money, which is sort of fantastic. In fact, you know, their borrowing costs are probably less than so far. So, you know, they may be getting as much as 600 or 800bps of free money on huge amounts of capital. So leverage is the best friend of prime broker. Now the risk guy is sitting there saying, well, wait a second. You know, I love lending, but I don't like lending to concentrate portfolios. I don't like lending to short sellers. You know, short sellers can get big, big, big, you know, leaps in their portfolio. It's like GameStop for example. So the most that long can lose is 100%. But if a Forex lever, the most long could lose is 25%. So, you know, there's sort of this mix of things you have to think about. I think the getting into the privates is usually like for me a lot a really bad sign for almost every fund because it's as tantalizing as private companies are. There is a whole group of people on the west coast are much better at that than the guys in the East Coast. And of course there are funds now like altimeter and CO2 and others that, that are doing both and doing both.
- [39:32]
Co-Host
Yeah. And what made that, what made it so tempting obviously for Leopold that just how close he is, like he couldn't be closer to anthropic. And it's a company that over the last 6 months has had 100x the demand relative to the allocation. Right. So it just felt like, and I don't know, who knows what the structure on those investments look like, but it's like if you're going to break your rule and do privates, then that's the company to do it with. But then you still get into a situation where you're like, wow, I really wish this was more liquid.
- [40:07]
Martin Shkreli
I can't press the sell button.
- [40:08]
Co-Host
Give us an update before you leave on Korea broadly, because a lot of people are commenting on, on, on just how similar Leopold's approach is to Korean retail. I don't know how true that is, but I can imagine like it's, there's blood in the water over there and the whole country is probably in shambles.
- [40:33]
Martin Shkreli
Yeah, I think so. I made a Cali Criterion calculator and like a little portfolio simulator tool that, you know, basically and Pulse reader Jones said this a while back and I had a problem with this. Every single trader out there makes, makes one seems to make the Same mistake over and over again, which is their position size is probably 2 to 10x more than it should be. And if you actually, you know, so it sounds nuts, right?
- [40:58]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [40:58]
Martin Shkreli
But if you actually run the simulator and we ours kelly.kelly. so Kelly was a guy at Bell Apps. He was a member of the technical staff, his original OG MOTs. And and so Kelly came up with the proof called famously the Kelly Criterion which gamblers use mostly was a gambler thing before a financing. And it proves the optimal bet size and the optimal bed size is your edge attracted by the reciprocal of it. So if you have 55% edge your optimal that size 10%, that's still quite volatile for folks. And so people do half Kelly or quarter Kelly. Most, most folks don't actually don't have an edge when they trade. But if they did have an edge, they're trading as if they had a 4x or 5x Kelly Edge, which is interestingly like you might sound. Okay, well that just sounds swashbuckling and like guy takes a lot of risk. No, if you run the simulator you will go to zero each time. And the simulator is a really cool tool that shows you even with a 6040 edge on every trade you make, you'll go bust if you bet. If you overbet and it's an eye opener, we might say who has a 6040 edge in the stock market? Nobody has 6040 edge, but you will absolutely go bust if you don't size correctly. And it's something that I've had to learn very painfully very over the years that I'm almost always over betting. And I think every fund is sort of the same and certainly every retailer is the same. And it's just sort of a weird variance math game that very few people actually map out and say can I simulate portfolio and just to see what is the right thing to do in most cases. And in fact I had a. After I left the Tiger Cub, I worked at. I worked in the briefly in the office of a guy who worked at SAC Capital now called Point72 for years. And he was one of the best managers who's quite guy nobody's ever heard of. Kind of retired. But I got to watch him before I set up my own hedge fund and did the exact opposite way over bet on everything. I got to sit with this guy for a few few months and I was astounded. So what I found is that, you know, he was managing I don't know, 3 or 400 million of his own. Basically he almost never used the capital, you know, 80, 90% of the capital was just cash and he would just make these tiny trades and the guy had almost never had a down I think his record was he never had a down quarter in 20, 20 something years of trading and he had like 20, 30% returns which is great. And the guy just kind of, you know, just did these little libels and he never lost money. And it was this incredible thing. And then of course, the second I get the chance to get some capital, I'm 8X, you know, it's just like, you know, it's the dumbest thing in the world, you know and, and you
- [43:36]
Interviewer
live and you learn psychology. Psychology. Well, thanks so much for coming on
- [43:39]
Co-Host
the show and breaking.
- [43:40]
Martin Shkreli
Thank you guys.
- [43:40]
Interviewer
This is always a great time.
- [43:41]
Co-Host
Yeah. Looking forward to yeah.
- [43:44]
Interviewer
Seeing where we go from here. Have a great week. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to Cheers, Marty. Bye.