I don't get it. What's supposed to be outrageous/"Un fucking believable" about that video? I watched the video once, and checking the transcript, the things she said were:
1. "yeah absolutely could pull it off without my math degree I use very little math" - given that her position is a CEO (ie. leadership), it seems plausible that she doesn't use her math degree in the day to day. Also, the clip has zero context as to what the question actually was.
2. "being comfortable with risk is very important" - Would you rather have a hedge fund CEO that's not comfortable with risk?
3. "we tend not to have things like stop losses I think those aren't necessarily great risk management tool" - ...which is true. Stop losses are basically market orders that get placed when the price drops below a certain amount. It's true that they can stop losses, but it could also lead you to sell at the bottom and at the worst price.
4. "trying to think of a good example of a trade where I've lost a ton of money um well I don't know I probably don't want to go into specifics too much with" - This is one of these questions where you need to have a prepared answer for, because answering it any any honest/unprepared way would make you look bad. The closest real life example would be something "what is your greatest weakness" or "what was the biggest fuck up in your last job". Obviously she didn't have one prepared, hence the response.
> It's true that they can stop losses, but it could also lead you to sell at the bottom and at the worst price.
Worse, in relatively illquid (and circuit breakerless) markets like the fringe cryptocurrencies they were investing in, stop losses can easily result in selling at absurd prices and can even be manipulated to do so. There was even a lawsuit against FTX for exploiting them.
E.g. say something is trading at $105 after falling a bit and you believe there are significant stop loss orders at $100 (perhaps aided by exchange insider knoweldege), you see that there is very little volume on the order book below $100. You then put in a huge buy wall at $10... sell down to $100 to trigger the stop losses, then laugh as idiotic stop losses dump coins into your $10 wall.
Moments later the asset is trading at $101 again.
In large liquid markets they're less risky because someone will usually hop up and take the deal at $99 so even though you get burned a little it usually won't be too bad. But cryptocurrency markets, particularly for the fringe scamcoins FTX was investing in are just not very liquid.
> we tend not to have things like stop losses I think those aren't necessarily great risk management tool
It seems to me that you need to have a stop loss to prevent blowing up when you have leverage. This sounds like one of those strategies that might work most of the time, but will eventually lead to bankruptcy, like picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer.
I haven't read Mark Spitznagel's latest book, but it's all about problems like this.
It also suggests that this hedge fund was run by amateurs that hadn't learnt the lessons of other overleveraged funds like LTCM.
https://youtu.be/aW6SqLXw944
Un fucking believable.