Aschenbrenner’s AI Fund Collapse Is Just The Beginning

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Is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Now streaming on Disney+. Rated PG-13. $70,000. Money markets matter. If money is evil, then that building is hell. The show goes on! The folks in there have watched the show. Show! Welcome to Profiteer Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is August 4th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices climbed after President Trump called off an attack and Iran indicated Hormuz negotiations are making progress. The Dow closed at a record high, and Amazon reached a $3 trillion valuation for the first time. Meanwhile, Brent crude fell, the yield on 10-year treasuries declined, and finally, the Japanese yen climbed after the U.S. joined Tokyo to support it. More on that later. Okay, what else is happening? For months, investors have been asking how the AI boom might end, and last week, they got a glimpse. 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund, Situational Awareness, sent a letter to investors on July 24th, reporting a 439% net return for the first half of the year. In a postscript, Aschenbrenner wrote that it was, quote, a particularly good time to add funds, but just six days later, the fund had lost roughly $35 billion in assets, plunging from a peak of $45 billion to around $10 billion, and Aschenbrenner was forced to unwind his entire public, stock portfolio in a fire sale that ended up going to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Investors are reading this story as a warning sign for the increasingly debt-fueled AI boom. Situational Awareness reportedly used as much as 400% leverage to amplify its bets on AI infrastructure. That helped the firm return more than 1,000% since its inception. But when those bets went south, the same leverage accelerated the losses and forced the fund into liquidation. We wanted to talk to someone who manages the fund and who has spent years thinking about leverage and market structure. So we're going to discuss this with Michael Green, Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management and author of the Yes, I Give a Fig sub-stack. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Let's just start with your initial reactions to the implosion of situational awareness. How did this happen? What can we learn from it? You know, the quick answer is, is that when you look at somebody who is engaged in the behaviors that Leo has, there's really no mechanism for him to have learned not to do this. And so he had a very strong thesis. He expressed it with the extraordinary use of leverage. His initial exposure was largely to non-public entities, and he had grown his business under that framework, which has a component of much lower volatility framing to it because non-public entities don't reprice themselves in the same manner. But when you start running strategies that are running, that much leverage against this much volatility for the individual's securities, unfortunately, a blow-up becomes inevitable. And it really looks like what happened within Leo's portfolio is that he created conditions under which a small decline in prices would force him to sell to reduce his leverage, which in turn caused prices to fall further, which caused him to be forced to sell to reduce leverage further. And ultimately, that cascaded into an event that sent both his longs, and his shorts, against him. In particular, he very much had the thesis that traditional software companies would be heavily disintermediated by the growth of AI, in particular the software sector. That obviously contributed to the underperformance of that sector for a period. His selling actually contributed to the underperformance of that sector. And as he began to be forced to unwind his portfolio, that forced prices to move in the opposite direction of his underlying positioning and created, I think, conditions for the rapid collapse of the fund and the need to delever it in as quick a time as he did. Nobody in their right mind should give a 25-year-old $20 billion at Forex leverage, but you actually can't blame the 24-year-old, right? The reality is he had a very strong view, he had a very strong conviction on his view, and everything in his experience base up to that point had told him that this was the right strategy to pursue. Once you become that large, the street actually identifies you as a target. You effectively become a wounded shark and a feeding frenzy emerges. You recently wrote a piece about how, I mean, many of the stocks that he was invested in, the semi-stocks like Nebius, Sandisk, Micron, etc., how a lot of the activity and the volatility that we're seeing in that market has been the result of the rise of leveraged ETFs. Could you talk more about how that is impacting the semiconductor sector, the sector right now, and why it matters to investors? A leveraged ETF carries the same characteristics as Leo's portfolio, which is obviously running at Forex leverage. And the difference between the two is that a leveraged ETF, because it has a prospectus that requires it to maintain that levered exposure, has to rebalance every day. And this is where volatility creates a phenomenon called volatility drag. If you imagine a series in which I make 10% today, and lose 10% tomorrow, many people would assume that the answer to that is I now have a zero return. But the reality is I start with $1, I now have $1.10, and I lose 10%, I have 0.99, 99 cents, I've lost a penny. If I add four times leverage to that, you actually end up with a two to the fourth power impact on that volatility drag. Instead of investing $1, I've now invested $1 of equity, and $3 of borrowing. I'm up 10%, therefore I suddenly have $440, meaning my equity has risen, because I only owe $300, my equity has risen to $140. That is a 40% gain on a 10% change in the underlier, exactly as you would anticipate. But if you do the exact same math for what happens now if I fall 10%, the compounding effect of that leverage and the need to rebalance it creates the condition that I have to rebalance it. The conditions that cause these sorts of catastrophic losses. If you then add the additional layers you do with the ETFs that they need to rebalance every single day, it's not like they went from $140 equity with $300 of borrowing. They actually have to lever up that $140 Forex. So four times $140 is going to be $660, right? So that actually means you were at $440 in terms of your exposure the day before. Now I have to increase my position. I have to increase my position sizes by nearly 50% to maintain the leverage that I've promised my investors. That means that it creates what's called endogenous flow. It actually forces buying even without new investors adding money into the system and contributes to the sort of run-up that we have seen unless investors harvest those gains. So the piece that I wrote about is called a semi-theory of everything in explaining how this phenomenon plays out when you have a lot of money in your bank, large series of complexes that have historically run on this. Most professional investors would run the way I described as a volatility harvesting strategy, taking advantage of the fact that that compounding creates a loss. You actually short both sides of the trade and harvest the volatility loss associated with the volatility drag. It creates a very stable return profile as long as your volatility characteristics are maintained. Unfortunately, in the excitement of. of the post-March recovery in markets, early April to be more precise, we actually saw retail investors step into these types of products because they were seeking out a Leopold-like experience. They were actually buying these 3x levered ETFs or 2x levered single stock ETFs and then holding rather than harvesting their positions. We actually saw a behavior that suggested people were trying to dollar cost average into these strategies. If you run through the math on this, it is just a terrible. terrible way to invest at 3x leverage running the level of volatility we were experiencing in the semiconductor space as of April, May, you would need a return in excess of 170% a year in order to simply break even on the volatility harvesting. To dollar-cost average into something that has 170% break-even is absolutely absurd, but again, a byproduct of the lack of education and, candidly, the tools that we have put out into the marketplace with an objective to attract people to shiny objects as compared to thoughtful investment vehicles. It seems like South Korea is the perfect example of how this all goes wrong. I mean, we saw what happened last week. We saw the KOSPI, the South Korean stock market, crashing 44% from its June highs. We saw literally more than a million people in South Korea receiving margin calls, hundreds of thousands seeing their accounts go up. We saw hundreds of thousands seeing their accounts go up. Here is what he said. We're very strong, very, very strong financially. They have a weakening yen and they wanted a little bit of help. And we're always there for Japan. Japan's been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. Joining us to discuss America's intervention in Japan, we're speaking with Katie Martin, markets columnist and editorial board member at the Financial Times. Katie, thank you for joining us on the show. I just got to start with your reactions to Trump's explanation as to why we have intervened here. Why have we done this? The line about Pearl Harbor is one of the unintentionally most hilarious things I've heard in Global Macro for quite some time. But there's various different ways of looking at this situation. There is definitely an interpretation here that it's just nice to be nice, right? And Japan has got a problem with a sliding currency and it's been trying to. It's been trying to tackle it and it hasn't really been working. The currency's just sort of been, you know, gradually dripping lower this whole time. Nothing's really been working. Admittedly, Japan hasn't really tried really jacking up interest rates, but it wanted some help and the U.S. came to help. And I think this is one quite important thing to bear in mind here is that one of the things that this joint intervention does, and as you mentioned, this is the first time the U.S. has been involved at all in this kind of way since 2011. But that was a G7 intervention. Actually, as a bilateral thing, you have to go back even further. You have to go back the best part of 30 years to find anything similar to this. Anyway, what it does is it's a signal to the world of we help out our friends. So if you recall back end of last year, Javier Mille, the president of Argentina, he wanted some help with his currency in the run-up to an election and Scott Besant came to help. Some countries. In the Gulf, in the Middle East, they needed some help around the time of the start of the war in Iran. And there was talk of opening up swap lines for countries that are friendly to U.S. interests that might need them. So the U.S. does make a show of being good friends to its friends. But I think there is more than a little self-interest going on here. You'll be shocked to hear. You know, Japan has two main ways of supporting its currency. It can raise interest rates really quickly, which is quite difficult to do for domestic reasons. Or it can sell loads of dollars. And I mean loads of dollars. And when it sells dollars, that means that it sells U.S. treasuries. Now, I'm sure listeners to your podcast are well aware that the U.S. treasury market is in a bit of a fix at the moment. Prices have been falling quite hard. Yields have been pushing up. And borrowing costs have got really quite elevated, especially for long-term debt. And so the. The last thing the U.S. wants is for Japan to dump a load of new treasuries onto the market. So I think that's why they're getting involved here. It's kind of a case of standing behind Japan, being that kind of big brother, and saying to the market, back off, stop selling this currency. From my understanding, Japan has been selling treasuries all year. They've done it multiple times before this summer. And if the yen continues to weaken, I mean, it seems as if Japan will just have to keep selling more of its treasuries. Or I guess the U.S. will have to continue to intervene and continue to send money over to them. I mean, why wouldn't this keep happening? Why wouldn't this repeat over and over again? Well, that's the thing. You know, I've been talking to a bunch of people in the markets about what's happened over the course of today. And most of them are saying, this stops the rot. You know, if there are speculative accounts out there that are trying to really harm the yen, and it's not clear to me that they are. It's not clear to me there's a massive market dislocation going on here. But in any case, this does help to slow that down. But really what would help Japan and what would help the currency to perk up at this point would be, first of all, some big rises in Japanese interest rates, as I mentioned. The problem there is, again, Japanese government bond yields, they're pretty low by global standards, but they're very high by Japanese standards. And if they get much higher because Japan raises interest rates, then all of a sudden there's a lot of Japanese investors for whom actually putting money to work in the U.S., putting money to work in U.S. treasuries kind of isn't worth it anymore. You may as well just keep that money at home. So again, a solution to the yen problem would potentially sap quite a lot of demand for U.S. treasuries out of the system. And again, that's not really in the U.S. interest. So what would really help the yen would be big rises in Japanese interest rates and or big declines in U.S. government bond yields because those markets tend to be closely correlated. Now, the reason that U.S. government bond markets are in trouble and the U.S. borrowing costs are higher is nothing to do with Japan. It's because the markets are listening to what they hear from Kevin. Walsh, new chair of the Fed, and saying, I don't get it. I just, I don't understand how the Fed is relating to markets at the moment. I don't understand why they're not raising interest rates given their stated objectives. In addition to which, the Fed under Kevin Walsh is talking about talking a lot less to markets and that introduces volatility. So ironically, if there was a shift in regime on the U.S. side, that would actually, actually do a lot more good for the currency on the Japanese side. So look, you know, will this go on all summer? Will we end up with the U.S. constantly coming into the dollar-yen market or weirdly the euro-yen market? But will it have to keep on buying yen to try and support the currency? Or is just the fact that they're there standing shoulder to shoulder with Japan, is that enough to put the market off? And there's a good chance that it is. One of the strange things about this, Katie, is that actually the U.S. is selling euros in this transaction, this intervention. Why is that happening? This is a total curveball. I've never heard of any country intervening in anyone else's market using a third-party currency before. This is a new one on me, a new one to everyone I've spoken to about it. But basically, it's a function of the fact that the pot of money that the U.S. has stored away for these sorts of instances is predominantly in euros and yen. So this is what they've done. They've got available to sell for these sorts of purposes. I gather, you know, from reporting that some of my colleagues have done at the FT, that the U.S. authorities have been in touch with the European Central Bank. They have been in contact about this. This didn't come as a total surprise, I don't think, to the European Central Bank. But again, if this carries on, and if the U.S. ends up in a situation where it's selling shedloads of euros against the yen, and you start to get exchange rate distortions, in the euro, as a result of what the U.S. is doing to help out Japan, we're not in Kansas anymore. I don't know how that counts out. Trump said something interesting in that clip. Of course, the Pearl Harbor part was the most interesting and hilarious. But at the beginning of it, he said that we are very financially strong. Basically saying, you know, we have the money to help them. We like them. So we're going to help them. My understanding is that we have trillions of dollars of debt. And actually, we're not very financially strong. I mean, what is your view on whether this is appropriate and to what extent we actually are in a position to be sending money over to nations when they're in a rut with their currency? I mean, the U.S. has tremendous financial firepower. You know, for all of the problems around debt sustainability, around little cracks that you can see in the stock market, the reality is, it operates the world's dominant reserve currency. It has very reliable demand for that debt. It definitely has the ability to do this. I guess one of the interesting questions that comes out of it, though, is who does Trump help in this way? Who does Besant help in this way? So, for example, say there was a problem in U.K. government bond markets. Would the politics dictate that Trump and Besant would come to the aid of the U.K.? Politically, probably not. If you are a trader or an investor, particularly if you're, you know, of a hedge fund kind of variety, do you start taking out bets against countries that you think are politically aligned with the U.S.? Or is there risk there that you could get caught on the wrong side of an intervention from Scott Besant? So, this is a whole new way of thinking about global macro, potentially. You know, which currencies, which bond markets is it possible to bet against when you have got this big beast, which is the U.S.? Standing behind them. Yes, I was going to bring up, you know, we had the similar situation with Argentina and Javier Millet, and this was right before his midterm election. Besant and Trump come in and they essentially bail out the Argentine peso. And then, in the case of Japan, I don't know much about the new prime minister, Takeichi, but I do know that she has praised Trump pretty extensively. She has said that only you, Donald, I'm quoting her, can achieve world peace, she pushed him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? You know, she said that this guy's great, which for me raises the question, like, is it unreasonable to assume that we are bailing Japan out, at least partly because the leader is saying nice things about our president? Is bailing out the right kind of framing for this? I'm not sure. But there are very clearly financial benefits to making nice with the US. But also, the US is clearly very sensitive to any possibility that any major buyers of US treasuries. It's worth bearing in mind that Japan officially holds in excess of a trillion dollars worth of US treasury securities. It's the biggest buyer of treasuries on the planet. But the US is very sensitive to the possibility that anyone could not even dump their treasuries, but just. feel a need not to buy quite so many treasuries in future. So, you know, the US had quite a kind of allergic reaction at the start of this year when Denmark was saying, well, maybe we're not going to buy so many US assets, what with how you're threatening to invade Greenland. This went down extremely badly. They're very sensitive to this. You know, the US has an enormous deficit. It is extremely reliant on these debt markets. It is not, for all of the bravado, I think, you know, Scott Besson's an intelligent man, and he knows that the US is not in a position to live without these foreign buyers of US securities. This is what keeps the show on the road in the States. So, is Takeichi playing a good game here? Quite possibly. You know, it is precisely the reluctance of Japanese authorities to tighten monetary policy and raise interest rates. And there is more kind of, there's more spending that comes as a result of this new Takeichi government. They're the core problems. Behind what's going on with the Japanese yen. But also, you know, domestically for Japan, inflation is a political issue. And inflation does come when you've got a weaker currency. So, that's the kind of symbiosis is that the US needs Japan to keep buying the treasuries. Japan needs the yen to be somewhat stronger than it currently is. And Japan also needs that security umbrella that comes from the States. So, this is very much the framework, that all different countries are operating under at the moment. It's very difficult geopolitically to distance yourself from the States when you have got all of these interrelationships between markets and geopolitics and security and defense and trade and all of those things all layered on top of each other. Arguably, Takeichi's playing quite a good game here if she can stop the rot in the currency because she's got the US standing behind her. All right. Katie Martin is markets columnist and editorial board member at the Financial Times. Katie, foreign exchange is probably the most difficult and confusing topic in all of financial markets. So, we appreciate you simplifying it down for us and making it understandable. Thank you so much. Pleasure. It's official. Trump is now selling early access to his social media posts to Wall Street. The first one, which was rumored to be happening a few weeks ago, is now final. Trump media has launched Truth API, a new high-speed data feed that gives financial firms a, quote, direct licensed real-time feed of the platform's most market-moving truths. In other words, pay Trump money and you will get early access to his social media. Now, how much money must you pay? Well, reportedly, you have to pay $100,000 per month. The next question is, is that worth it? Well, if you're a high-frequency trading firm, the answer is yes. Trump's tweets move billions of dollars within seconds. Those are billions of dollars that Wall Street must pursue. So, if you're a real trading firm, well, then you don't have much of a choice. You have to buy this product. And as a result, Trump will make millions off of this. It's kind of like his Trump coin cryptocurrency grift, only this one is a lot bigger and a lot worse. If you're as tired of hearing about Trump's corruption as I am, then you're going to have to buy this product. If you're as tired of hearing about Trump's corruption as I am, then you probably don't really care much to hear about this story. It's just another chapter in an endless anthology of fraud and shameless profiteering at the White House. But therein lies the problem. Because the reality is, this story should be front-page news across every single media platform in the nation. It is a federal scandal, the likes of which we've never seen. But it isn't front-page news. It's a federal scandal. It's because it has become normalized. We are now numb to these kinds of headlines. We treat them as if it's any other story. And maybe it is, in which case, look how far we've fallen. The only thing left between America becoming a literal third-world nation isn't regulation. That's been gutted. It isn't enforcement. And it certainly isn't Congress. The only thing left is you, or more specifically, you and your ability to do what you want. Now, they know this. And that's why they'll do everything in their power to convince you that this doesn't matter, and that you shouldn't care, and that it's just a sideshow. But as someone who is just as tired and bored of this as you are, I'm here to tell you, you should. Do not stop caring. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Kristen O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. BJ's, home of the Save. 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