FINILLÍN

finance insider and educator | content creator 🔋💵

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@isssa0x curious what the biggest lesson was from a swing you took

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

A BILLIONAIRE WHO CO-FOUNDED A CREDIT FIRM MANAGING 223 BILLION DOLLARS SAYS MOST PEOPLE LOSE MONEY NOT BY TAKING RISKS BUT BY CHASING SAFE ONES

HOWARD MARKS SPENT AUGUST 2025 TELLING BLOOMBERG TELEVISION THAT STOCKS LOOKED LIKE THE EARLY DAYS OF A BUBBLE

-> the two rules he uses to spot a bargain from a trap are simple enough for nearly anyone with a savings account to use, so see it below

-> howard marks spent august 2025 telling bloomberg television that stocks looked like the early days of a bubble, comparing the mood to 1997, right before the dot com run really took off.

-> he has been managing money since the 1970s and co-founded oaktree capital in 1995 with bruce karsh. by the end of 2025 the firm was running 223 billion dollars, most of it made by buying the debt of companies everyone else had already given up on.

-> his whole career sits on one line he has repeated for decades: there are few things as risky as the widespread belief that there is no risk. the nifty fifty stocks in 1969, internet stocks in 1999, mortgage bonds in 2006, all crashed for the same reason. nobody in the room could name the flaw before it happened.

-> that is the opposite of how most people judge safety. owning what everyone else already owns feels responsible, not risky. marks treats it as the warning sign, because once a crowd agrees something is safe, nobody demands extra return for holding it, and the price climbs until one bad surprise turns it into a crash.

-> his advice in that interview was almost boring, add a little more defense, favor credit because it comes with a contractual promise instead of hope. it only sounds boring until you remember he has been saying versions of it since disco was popular and is still worth roughly 2 billion dollars for it.

-> this is the third rule from an old billionaire i have taped above my desk this year, and it is already the one i lean on the most. before buying anything because it feels safe, name the one thing that could actually go wrong. if nobody in the room can name it in a single sentence, that silence is the risk, not the reassurance.

most people think owning whatever everyone else already owns is the cautious move, when it is usually just risk wearing a disguise.

which position in your account right now could you not explain to a stranger in one sentence?

[Di Krass @Di_Krass_]

https://t.co/h8IkMUDhNc

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@captai__ does he address fund flows at all?

when everyone piles into the same safety trade it stops being safe

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@beamnxw marks has been saying this exact thing for 20 years and people still don't listen

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Solerbtc the trick is identifying which unloved asset is actually unloved vs which one deserves to be

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Pexzzn that bar scene is such a perfect teaching tool. makes

the abstraction actually click for people

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@dallamicoh kelly formula being the same sharpe ratio you're already checking for significance.

never connected those two until now

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Allx032 so the real move is front-loading principal payments soon as you can.

not waiting til year 20

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Solerbtc that 22 cent figure is brutal when you zoom out.

credit card users are just funding someone else's wealth compounding

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Yumslef that is real alpha content!

thanks, bookmarked.

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@isssa0x the factor decay part is brutal.

published, then people trade it, then it's dead. rinse and repeat

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Yumslef the sovereign ai angle is wild. which countries do you think move fastest on this?

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@caderoas honestly worse that he had that much power with basically zero experience

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

A 28 YEAR OLD TRADER IN SINGAPORE HID HIS LOSSES IN A SECRET ACCOUNT UNTIL THEY HIT 1.4 BILLION DOLLARS, AND SANK A BANK THAT HAD SURVIVED 233 YEARS, TWO WORLD WARS INCLUDED

how one junior trader, with barely any oversight hid it all from everyone above him, so check it out here

nick leeson was 28 and ran barings bank's trading floor in singapore, betting on which way asian markets would move, when a junior trader under him lost 20,000 pounds on a bad trade back in 1992.

instead of reporting it up the chain, leeson opened a hidden error account and numbered it 88888, supposedly because eight is considered lucky in chinese culture, and buried the loss inside it.

that one decision put him in a position almost nobody in finance is ever handed, he was the trader placing the bets and the same person responsible for checking them.

so when his own trades started losing money too, he fed them into the same account and kept doubling down, certain he could trade his way back to zero before anyone looked.

by early 1995 he had built a bet on the tokyo stock market bigger than barings entire trading capital, then the kobe earthquake hit and the market fell out from under him in days.

the hole in account 88888 reached 827 million pounds, somewhere around 1.3 to 1.4 billion dollars depending which year's exchange rate you use, twice as much money as the whole bank had.

barings had survived the napoleonic wars, two world wars and 233 years of british banking history, and it collapsed inside a week once the account was finally opened, sold off to a dutch bank for one pound.

leeson fled to frankfurt, was arrested at the airport, and served most of a six and a half year sentence in a singapore prison, where his wife left him and he was diagnosed with colon cancer.

every part of it traced back to one structural mistake nobody had bothered to fix, the same one that shows up almost every time a lone trader blows up a firm, the person placing the trades was also the person marking his own homework

everyone assumes fraud like this needs a genius. it just needs one person left alone with both the trades and the books, so how sure are you that nobody in your own job is being trusted the same way right now?

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Benderxxx7 that's the story nobody talks about.

operational risk kills more firms than bad bets do

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Yumzlef the frame-by-frame sync part is what actually converts viewers though, not just having the tools

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@caderoas the insurance angle is wild. who else signs their name under that many simultaneous risks and sleeps fine

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@BlueDeltaHQ saved this, the intuition on why delta hedging works beats every article I've read on it

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Allx032 personal guarantees are the only thing that kept creditors at the table instead of liquidating everything on day one

[FINILLÍN @finillin_dev]

@Primee32 did he ever say how his partner reacted when he said a billion instead of 50 million