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@RagingVentures

Raging Capital Ventures on X

Some thoughts of mine on Archegos from May 2021 (below). Was Leopold using swaps? The value of Situational’s reported Q1 13F holdings pale in comparison to some of the exposure numbers being mentioned today, even adjusting for appreciation. I would observe that once Archegos blew up at the end of March 2021, many previously impossible shorts (names like $TDOC and $TRUP come to mind) became much easier to navigate and ultimately collapsed… ****** PEELING BACK THE ARCHEGOS ONION The implosion of Archegos is a very important market development and I hope regulators peel back the onion to truly understand what occurred. Archegos owned massive swap positions in companies like ViacomCBS (VIAC), Discovery Communications (DISCA), Tencent Music (TME), and GSX Techedu (GSX), in some cases controlling 20-50% of their tradeable float. Swap ISDA agreements typically limit aggregate ownership in a single company to 4-9%. Archegos appears to have aggressively violated these limits and/or the prime brokers looked the other way, enabling the firm to corner numerous large stocks in the U.S. equity markets. Notably, Archegos owned perhaps 50% of the float of a reputed fraud, GSX. How long has Archegos’ Bill Hwang been cornering stocks like this? He is rumored to have turned $200 mm into $5 b over the past six years (and may have briefly tripled that amount to $15 b during early 2021). What other short squeezes did he orchestrate in recent years? Are other funds using similar strategies as Archegos, and were there wolf packs of funds that Archegos was communicating with on these squeezes? My hunch is that Hwang and his ilk have been cornering stocks for years, with the typical exit plan being the sale of his positions to passive indexes who are perversely designed to buy more of a stock the higher the price goes. This underscores a major issue with passive investing. Archegos’ machinations also created tremendous pain for short selling hedge funds, which provide a valuable ballast for the entire stock market. Furthermore, if you peel back the onion enough, I think you will find an Archegos (or a similar fund) connection to Tesla (TSLA), which was squeezed multiple times until it was added to the S&P 500. Is it possible that Elon Musk, who regularly attacked the shorts, and who in 2018 was making unusual pre-market trades in his own stock at prices well above the prevailing market price, was somehow connected to this action?
@ActAccordingly 1 click

PAA Research on X

A name for @dirtcheapstocks and @dirtcheapbanks... $ETD. $600 mkt cap, $133MM in cash, no debt. Generated $40MM+ in cash flow last year. They also have extensive real estate holdings (unencumbered) which could be worth $175-$275MM. They pay a regular dividend of $0.39/quarter which is about a 7.0% yield. For the past 6-years they've used any excess FCF to pay special dividends to shareholders. The stock trades at 1.5x book (which is clearly understated). Seems like someone should buy this biz.