
Chris Sacca, the $4M Negative Balance, the Salinger Group and Twitter (2015) - ca98am79
http://www.financemagnates.com/forex/brokers/chris-saccathe-4million-negative-balance-salinger-group-twitter/
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chollida1
Not alot of detail in the article. This profile by Forbes is a bit better
IMHO.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/03/25/how-
ventu...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/03/25/how-venture-
cowboy-chris-sacca-made-billions/#42f76636597d)

He arguably had one of the most successful funds ever created. Just have a
look to see how many of the names he's invested in you recognize.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-
sacca/investments](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-sacca/investments)

He is a hustler's hustler. In both the good and bad sense.

He goes into this alot on this podcast [http://tim.blog/2015/05/30/chris-
sacca/](http://tim.blog/2015/05/30/chris-sacca/)

~~~
jordan_litko
What do you mean when you say that he's a hustler, both good and bad?

Am I missing out on some drama?

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jhspaybar
Is exploiting software bugs to achieve leverage larger than is normally
allowed and getting into a $4 million hole not drama enough?

~~~
rubiquity
And letting your friends use your law firm group of 1 to fill resume gaps in
their employment history.

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tommymachine
But seriously, who here hasn't done that?

------
greglindahl
(2015)

~~~
dang
Thanks! Added.

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archon810
This website is horrible on mobile.

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throwaway833
_Sgamblingtarting with around $10-$20,000 in what were college loans, Sacca
realized that brokers weren’t accounting for margin usage on a real-time
basis. The result was that even though firms were only allowing 50% margin, as
long as a customer closed a trade before the trade settled, T+3, and showed
proper equity in the account, positions larger than 50% margin usage could be
opened._

So this guy bought stock on margin he shouldn't have been able to, because
certain on-line trading systems at the time didn't check margin account
balances in real-time. In effect, he borrowed assets with collateral he
purported to have but in fact did not. This seems ethically questionable, at
the very least, and possibly even fraudulent. But it's probably exactly the
kind of "naughtiness" that YC prises in its founders:

 _4\. Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have
a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good.
Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about
observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.
They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be
redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what
question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us
discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked
something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not
breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most
attention to when judging applications._

[http://paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://paulgraham.com/founders.html)

~~~
elastic_church
Protip: nobody calculates margin in real time accurately, especially when
mixing option spreads across indices, stocks and futures in the same account.

Futures use SPAN margining and funds have to be moved behind the scenes but
many brokers still report REG-T margin or the slightly more advanced Portfolio
Margining which is capable of weighting the entire portfolio.

Ethically questionable? Who gives a fuck, did he make money or nah? The Fed,
SROs, and individual brokerage firms set the margin limits. And when you are
rich enough you can have your own lack-of-compliance officer and what-risk?
manager

