Technology

and whether he has enough liquidity to maintain his margin during absolutely insane market distortions by hedge funds, big banks, and the government.

We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn't short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they're going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don't own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you're right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn't sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you're buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It's currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn't work out. You don't have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You're out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it's now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It's just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn't going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they'd be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don't think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they'd try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there's going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They're the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance's political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he'll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they'll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there's just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Edit: Redacted a mistaken identity

I'm not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.

The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars

He doesn't have a billion dollars. He's a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people's investment money. Its that money he's betting.

Them he’s betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we’re okay with that shit.

No, he's not. He's betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I'm not sure I'd bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil, ~~trump's deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character's job.~~

We already know trump's favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.

All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell

The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important "canary in the coal mine" for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can't criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.

Frankly I don't like your idea of jailing someone that says "The emperor has no clothes".

Them he's betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we're okay with that shit.

Why should someone not be able to short some stock? The AI bubble will burst anyway.

Also, he doesn't have one billion dollars, he manages an investment fund that people collectively put a billion dollars (or more) there.

I stopped putting money into us equities and started to put them in purely international index funds. I havent sold anything though.

And even if they solve some problems with AI and make them smarter, they still have to solve the "actually making a profit" problem to justify these share prices. LLMs already have some use at their current level, but certainly not for the price they'd need to charge to break even, let alone actually making a profit. If they double the smarts but double the training and/or inference cost, they'll still end up in the same place.

I don’t follow the AI bubble trend at all. But I have been seeing alot of videos all of a sudden, popping up in my recommended talking about it. Who knows.

A few banks started issuing warnings, and some of the "biggest upcoming launches" were extremely underwhelming, like Sora 2 and GPT 5. Not only that, but the companies going all in on replacing workers with AI are still not showing a clear return on investment, so this combination is making people more aware about the bubble.