Gambling for redemption is this last-resort, hail-Mary type solution when you're in a financial pinch. Usually this is fund managers etc having lost too much and instead of owning up to it they go apeshit 40x long on some exotic instrument. What's there to lose?!
- heads, I still go to prison;
- tails I can save myself out of this.
Here's the schematic:
Now, Levine tells us about some well-known examples in our world: Tether/Bitfinex hack, or even FTX. Both of those companies lost/swindled a bunch of money and defrauded their "depositors"—but, then luckily, crypto prices saved them and then they have/could have repaid everyone their dollar amounts. TA-DAAAH!
What iiiiiif, instead they succeed?
Levine digs up a dude, Carl Erik Rinsch, apparently some movie director that Netflix paid $11 mil to make a science fiction show. Of course he didn't make a show and instead transferred the funds to his brokerage account, thinking he was an epic day-trader. Obviously he lost most of that money—while telling Netflix that the show was coming along nicely.
There is absolutely no reason to expect a television producer to make a profit day-trading biopharma options, and he didn’t.
In 2021 he was then in a pickle: no show, and half the money gone... so he got the rest of the money—and YOLO'd it into crypto... lucky sod managed to survive:
There’s no reason to expect him to make money day-trading stock options, but everyone was making money on crypto in 2021; why shouldn’t he? He did. In fact, as far as I can tell, he made back approximately all of the money.
Fantastic! End of the saga, he made a show and/or gave Netflix the money back...?
OF COURSE NOT
This is a tale of a degenerate gambler/defrauder type... he ain't giving up!
...a bunch of size stays at the Four Seasons, $3.8 mil on furniture, $2.4 mil on cars...
Yes, right, if you lose all of your investors’ money day-trading stock options, and then you make it all back day-trading crypto, the rational thing to do is to hand the money back to the investors and say “sorry never mind, things didn’t work out but here’s your money back,” [7] but you are not going to do the rational thing now are you? You’re going to sue your investors for more money.
oh, man these stories crack me up!
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