26 March 2021: Archegos blows up
Banks began dumping huge blocks of shares in companies like ViacomCBS and Discovery after Bill Hwang's family office, Archegos Capital, failed to meet margin calls. Archegos had used swaps to build massive, hidden leveraged positions. The banks that moved slowest suffered the most; Credit Suisse lost about $5.5 billion. It was one of the largest trading losses in history, and few had seen it coming.
The lesson: Hidden leverage can turn a private fund's mistake into a problem for the entire financial system.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Credit Suisse at the start of 2020 → $61.54 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is a loss of $938, while a plain index fund over the same years made $1,092.
What Credit Suisse teaches: Repeated risk-management failures are a pattern rather than bad luck, and a bank's reputation can collapse long before its balance sheet visibly does.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $24.00 | $33.33 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $18.00 | $44.44 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $13.00 | $61.54 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Credit Suisse? Every starting year and the full story →
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Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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