Archegos Capital Management Crisis

by Martin Armstrong

The Archegos Capital was founded by the former Tiger Management equity analyst, Bill Hwang. Archegos Capital, the “home office” hedge fund owned by Bill Hwang, lost an unbelievable $110 billion in just five days. The strategy was the classic leverage using SWAPS. They never purchased shares of stocks in companies like ViacomCBS. Archegos Capital was entering into equity swaps with numerous different banks and investment banks in a similar manner to what would be called money laundering where we borrow from one bank to pay off another.

By engaging SWAPS, Archegos Capital never actually owned shares of the underlying stock. What they did was effectively leveraged themselves by as much as 500%, which would prove to be their undoing. The problem with such hedge funds is that they really take a personal view of the performance of the market going forward. This is ALWAYS the undoing of these hedge funds going back to Long-Term Capital Management which took a fundamental view that they would make a guaranteed fortune on the high interest of Russian debt and that bribes were being paid in the IMF that they thought would keep the loans going to Russia without end.

I cannot stress enough that ANY fund which is dominated by fundamental expectations that override quantitative models, should be AVOIDED like the plague. We are into a whole new world of finance which is moving in a counter-reaction to the Great Reset. There is NO QUESTION that the March 2020 crash was not only UNIQUE in history, it was clearly an assault that attempted to create another 2007-2009 economic contraction which would have made facilitated the Great Reset by the intentional destruction of the economy. They have had to rely upon the virus scare to accomplished what they had hoped would have be a far easier road.