There are two Sams in crypto you don't want to be your counterparty and alabama sam is one of them. Also known as Sam Trabucco, he is the CEO and quant trader at Alameda Research which was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who also founded FTX.
It's a bit weird that one of the largest exchange owners in crypto also has a trading firm that trades on that exchange and one of the largest market makers in that space but we will focus on that in a later post.
This post will be analysing Sam Trabucco's famous threads about how he stole our money and coins and plans to donate it to Joe Biden during the next presidential election.
The Tether Depeg to 95c
Still can't believe this really happened and I witnessed the crash of USDT to 95c. BTCUSDT contracts one exchanges that were denominated in USDT were trading at different prices due to the variations in the price of USDT.
While retail was panic selling USDT for other stablecoins, Alameda was seen on-chain buying hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions worth of USDT and arbing it for real United States Dollars by redeeming it on the tether website.
Sam "we bought your coins below 30k" Trabucco
I doubt we ever get these types of tweets from Sam ever again due to the growth of FTX, Alameda and the crypto markets in general. I was not really that deep into Crypto in July of 2021 but it's crazy how the CEO of one of the largest trading firms in crypto managing tens of billions publicly stated their bullishness at the local bottom.
Sam teaching about efficient markets
Let's flash back for a moment to my favorite day to bring up on Twitter: March 12, 2020. At this point, we all know roughly what happened there:
- the world decided COVID was bad
- equity markets crashed
- crypto markets crashed even more (liquidations, etc. -> big momentum) pic.twitter.com/vl5wGS5QVV— Sam Trabucco (@AlamedaTrabucco) November 30, 2021
This is a great thread explaining how markets become more efficient over time. Basically the as more people learn about how the markets react to a certain news, the quicker the reaction occurs and the less time you have to react. Covid took months to recover but every subsequent covid variation took lesser time for the markets to recover once it found out its effects.
This is pretty similar to how in mania and froth stages of a trend, the pump and subsequent dump happens quicker and quicker. Initial Elon Musk dogecoin tweets had a great impact on the market and you couldn't see the dump on the minute chart but by the 50th tweet about dogecoin, you could see the bart on the Dogecoin 1 minute chart as the market become more efficient and didn't react to the Elon Musk tweet as it was the same as the previous 49 tweets.
This can also be observed in metagames such as NFTs, DeFi etc. The launch and initial pump of Bored Apes was a totally new idea and took months to complete its cycle of the initial slow pump and dump after the launch of the Othersie Metaverse over the course of months. However the 50th NFT PFP Project went through that entire cycle in the course of days as market participants understand the landscape better. So while you had months to accumulate Bored Apes, you only have hours or minutes to accumulate newer NFT projects that follow the same playbook.
Sam bought your liquidations
Well. Crypto's crashed quite a bit in the past few days, leading up to a GIANT crash (BTC touched sub-$30k!) a few hours ago. It's ticked back up somewhat since, and started bouncing around a bit. What happened?
A thread about lemons and lemonade. pic.twitter.com/LY8bXblDaH— Sam Trabucco (@AlamedaTrabucco) May 20, 2021
Sam yet again talking about how he took our money. Interesting how he said that day was more important than any other day in the past three months of 2021. In an interview, he also said that instead of lending out stablecoins to get yield he would rather keep USD stablecoins on exchanges ready to buy huge capitulations caused by liquidations. Usually during these large moves, in certain exchanges there might be huge arbitrage opportunites and you can capture large percentage moves if you "knew when to buy the bottom". You can get a small single percentage yield or buy the mega liquidations.
Empirically, though, I think it's been frequent enough to justify at least having *some* easily-accessed capital laying around. You could easily make multiples on $ you had if you, e.g., knew when to buy the bottom -- disregarding lower risk %s-wide spreads.
— Sam Trabucco (@AlamedaTrabucco) May 20, 2021