nightsky81's Shortform

nightsky81

This is a special post for quick takes by nightsky81. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

CNBC is reporting that Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund was forced to sell its public stock holdings to Citadel after heavy losses in the market. It is unclear if the fund sold its stake in Anthropic, a private company. The article also states that Aschenbrenner is engaged to Avital Balwit, who holds a position as Dario Amodei's chief of staff, but I don't think this information is relevant in general or to this incident in particular.

From my perspective as an uninformed spectator, I would expect the bets made by Situational Awareness to be positive EV over the long run. The fund has demonstrated incredible performance until this point and I think their portfolio would have continued to perform well. I can only speculate that the fund's losses were caused by scaling their bet sizing and/or leverage too aggressively.

3Xodarap3mo

They are reportedly up 80% this year even after this loss. This is a better return than any hedge fund listed in this list of best performing hedge funds for 2025, though I'm a bit unclear what a fair reference class is.

Your first link is broken.

4MichaelDickens3mo

If you're not giving a lot of attention to risk management, I think it's easy to say, "Look, our investments are up 200% this year! Think of how much more we could've made if we'd used even more leverage!"