🌍 Sanctions blow a hidden hole in leveraged counterparty books
Writing Russian assets to zero and cutting Russian entities out of the payments system propagates through swaps, derivatives and trade-finance exposures nobody can see; the shock to the financial system has not been realised and shows up when books settle at month-end. Friedberg's call, table-pounded four times; Chamath calls it a complete red herring because the equity value at risk is only tens of billions.
⚖ Why this verdict
fully deterministic — evaluate.py replays this from daily closes; nothing below is editable or hand-set
- Window: 2022-03-05 → 2022-06-05 — first mention + 3-month horizon, then the window locks.
- The call: ▼ SHORT EUFN (primary play). EUFN rose 13.5% over the window → direction-adjusted R = -13.5% (the call lost money).
- Benchmark: holding SPY over the same window returned -1.8%
→ α = -13.5 − (-1.8) = -11.7%
— what this call made or lost against just owning the index. This is the number the verdict uses.
Stock-selection read: -15.3% — did EUFN move the predicted way relative to the market. The two only differ on a SHORT: this call beat the index outright.
- Rule fired:
· HIT — R ≥ +10% AND α ≥ +5· PARTIAL — R ≥ +5% OR α ≥ 0▶ MISS — everything else
- Credit: supporters of a MISS earn 0 each, opposers the inverse — this feeds the scoreboard weights. supported: Friedberg | opposed: Chamath | proxy-sensitive: HYG→PARTIAL (+2.7%); XLF→PARTIAL (+2.4%)
Conviction timeline
bands: green ≥ 65 · watch ≥ 45 · ember ≥ 15
Plays vs SPY · % since first mention (2022-03-05)
Plays
| expression | symbol | kind | relevance | rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ▼ SHORT | EUFN | etf | PRIMARY | European banks hold the direct Russian counterparty, trade-finance and swap exposure Friedberg is pointing at |
| ▼ SHORT | HYG | etf | adjacent | credit spreads are where an unseen counterparty default shows up first |
| ▼ SHORT | XLF | etf | adjacent | US financials if the counterparty hole generalises |
Mention log
“Forget about the equity value. Just think about the economic repercussions where there is leveraged positions and swaps and derivatives in place, counterparty swaps in place with a lot of these companies that are now going to default. And we're not going to know that till the end of this month when everything has to settle and no one's going to be able to make their payments. ... The shock to the system, I don't think, has yet been realized. And I think we'll know at the end of this month when books close what things actually do to businesses, to swap agreements, to trades”
“I think this is a complete red herring. ... the global total market cap of all of these businesses is meaningfully different than the amount of total capex that these guys represent. And in as much as you are going to take the equity values of certain of these companies to zero, it's in the grand scheme of things, not that much equity value.”
Who built this conviction
each voice's total force on the score — supports and opposes from every mention, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of all mention-driven movement
⏳ decay drained -8.5 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one
Score events
| episode | kind | Δ | after | note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E71 2022-03-05 | init | +38.9 | 38.9 | E71 born by Friedberg (explicit_prediction x3) [w=0.93] |
| E71 2022-03-05 | oppose | -15.3 | 23.5 | E71 Chamath opposes x3 [w=1.06] |
| E72 2022-03-19 | decay | -0.9 | 22.6 | E72 silent |
| E73 2022-03-26 | decay | -0.9 | 21.7 | E73 silent |
| E74 2022-04-01 | decay | -0.9 | 20.8 | E74 silent |
| E75 2022-04-09 | decay | -0.8 | 20.0 | E75 silent |
| E76 2022-04-16 | decay | -0.8 | 19.2 | E76 silent |
| E77 2022-04-23 | decay | -0.8 | 18.4 | E77 silent |
| E78 2022-04-30 | decay | -0.7 | 17.7 | E78 silent |
| E79 2022-05-07 | decay | -0.7 | 17.0 | E79 silent |
| E80 2022-05-13 | decay | -0.7 | 16.3 | E80 silent |
| E81 2022-05-23 | decay | -0.7 | 15.6 | E81 silent |
| E82 2022-05-24 | decay | -0.6 | 15.0 | E82 silent |