Patrick Boyle
283K subscribers
Bill Hwang, founder of Archegos Capital Management, has been arrested by US authorities and charged with racketeering, fraud and market manipulation. The indictment accuses Hwang and former chief financial officer Patrick Halligan, of using Archegos as an “instrument of market manipulation and fraud” with “far-reaching consequences for other participants in the United States securities markets”. The case marks the first criminal charges against Hwang, one of the so-called Tiger Cub veterans of Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management fund whose little-known investment vehicle rattled some of Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions when it imploded a year ago. Archegos’s collapse caused billions of dollars of losses for investment banks including Credit Suisse, UBS, Nomura and Morgan Stanley after it defaulted on margin calls, with more than $100bn wiped from the valuations of nearly a dozen companies as Archegos’s positions were unwound. The group used borrowed money from banks such as Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse to amass multibillion-dollar positions in US-listed companies such as ViacomCBS — now known as Paramount — and online retailers Shopify and Farfetch. By using derivatives known as Total Return Swaps, where the bank it traded with bought or sold stocks on Archegos’s behalf, the firm left no visible footprint of its activity to the investing public.
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Crime on Wall Street. The rise and the fall of titans. Some just decide to break the law.
Then they get caught hopefully....