Formula 1: The GOAT

Two weeks later.

Rümeysa looked out of the window as their private driver drove her towards the Beaverbrook Hotel, which the family office had fully booked for an entire month.

It didn’t take them long to arrive, as the gate was opened for them once their credentials were checked and verified, allowing her to finally enter the massive hotel estate as the car came to a stop at the grand entrance. One of the hotel valets rushed to open the door for her while she was in the middle of doing so already, but she thanked him before entering the hotel and heading directly to the meeting room.

When she entered the meeting room, she found all of the chairs already occupied, leaving only the one at the head of the table, where she immediately took a seat. Everyone in the room was looking at her, as she was their boss, and was waiting for her to give the go-ahead for the meeting to start. She didn’t want to waste anyone’s time and immediately approved for the meeting to start.

”Based on the extensive data, along with the individuals we have invited to do the checking, we have all unanimously agreed that they are correct,” the person chosen to do the final presentation said as they started their presentation.

The very next day after the talk with her son, when she had a video conference call with all of the Special Purpose Vehicle companies that were founded by the family office, she called for an emergency gathering and booked the hotel at a premium, costing her a million dollars for the entire month of exclusive access to the hotel.

It took everyone a maximum of two days before all the nearly fifty people arrived at the hotel and checked in. Only then, after collecting their electronic devices, signing an NDA, and a few other documents, did she distribute the documents that those at Odin Analytics had prepared for everyone to have a look.

She wanted to hear the experts’ opinion on the document, but she knew its value and that if it were true, it needed to be protected by contracts so that no one in the room would go out and start talking about it. It took them two weeks before they had enough confidence to give her a report of their thoughts on the document.

When she heard that the chances of the document being correct were high enough for them to go ahead with investments, she felt her heart drop as she realized that she had internally been hoping that her son and Odin Analytics were wrong. Being right meant that tens of millions of people were going to die from the disease, and it was not a good feeling at all to earn money as a direct consequence of their deaths.

But having thought about it for the last two weeks, she knew that even if she didn’t do anything investment-wise, this disease was going to happen and people were going to die anyway, so she steeled herself to go ahead with it if it was true.

With the checks now complete and everything having been verified, it was time for the investment plan to be verified as well, and also to decide which SPV was assigned what task. They had the next two weeks to come up with all of those plans before immediately taking action.

During the entire period, she had never mentioned her son to the people in the room once, and all the questions regarding where such a groundbreaking paper came from, she attributed all of it to Odin Analytics. She didn’t want any of the attention from this matter to be directed to her son, no matter how improbable it was that the conversations happening inside would leak to the outside.

........

”This is what they improved on your investment plan,” Rümeysa said as she placed a thick document for him to go through. The document looked twice as thick as the one she had given his mother three weeks ago, making him wonder if this was her form of revenge for having done the same.

”Take a look at it and see if there are things you are curious about or want to modify so that we can modify the plan before we implement it,” she added as she slid the stack of documents towards Fatih on the same dinner table where he had done the same.

”How long do I have?” Fatih asked as he collected the documents.

”The faster you finish going through it, the better, because we are planning on immediately making the investments as soon as possible,” she said, pausing for a moment before she added, ”But you can take a week to go through it if it is too much,” to try and unburden her son.

”I will give an answer tomorrow,” he said before reaching for the cup at the center of the dining table that had pens, pencils, erasers, a ruler, and other small stationery objects, picking a pen and immediately diving into the document.

The document contained more than even he had expected, as it started from targeting not just single companies but betting against the entire sector, shorting against the VIX index (fear index)1, the S&P, and more, including Credit Default Swaps2.

If structured correctly through multiple brokers and using leverage and more complicated instruments, a two hundred million total CDS contract could have a return from anywhere between 10x all the way to 50x of the investment,1 meaning that two hundred million dollars could return tens of billions if it actually works. But if it doesn’t, they would be losing all of it.

What attracted his attention was the prediction of when the bottom of the market would be, before governments would start printing money to prop it up. Many of them predicted it to be between April and May, and Fatih immediately opened the pen and put an X on that prediction before writing over it, ”We must exit all of our short positions by the 15th of March.”

The 23rd of March was when the US approved near-infinite Quantitative Easing and printed money like there was no tomorrow. It was something he remembered clearly because it was within that period when news of people receiving checks from the government directly came out, and he was one of those recipients in his previous life.

So they needed to have exited all the bets that things were going down and bet in the opposite direction for many of the industries that fell, while increasing their investment in the ones that were already on the rise.

Rümeysa just looked at Fatih, who was going through a page a minute while making small adjustments here and there, as she wondered where all of this confidence was coming from. But she wasn’t going to interrupt him at all, as he was the one who had been the cause of their discovery, so his insight was going to be looked upon favorably by her and would be taken into consideration when the document was re-reviewed and adjusted.

It took Fatih five entire hours of going through the document with full focus before he finally finished it, and it was the time he thanked God for his neck strength, as if his neck muscles weren’t developed, he would have already had a neck sprain.

He walked to the living room where his mother was watching TV and handed her the document, to her surprised look. She soon exhaled with a sigh of resignation, knowing that she was not going to be sleeping anytime soon, since she would now have to go through it for the rest of the night before approving and sending it to the executives still at the hotel for things to move as fast as possible.

......

When you have money and have already established relationships with banks, stock market brokers, private banks, and investment banks all over the developed world through different entities, things move fast.

Three days after the final document was approved, the SPVs started making their moves, all focusing on different areas using different investment banks so as to spread their actions as wide as possible and not attract the attention of any single entity who might realize what was happening, even if they wouldn’t know why.

The plan was to distribute these bets throughout the month of December and the first two weeks of January and have everything finished by then so that they would only be waiting for the incident to happen.

They were rushing because the document had already been sent to the WHO, and if they were to read it, go through it, and issue an announcement, that would immediately start the fall of the market, or so they thought.

But while his mother was having to use sleeping medication to sleep from the anxiety she was feeling due to the large amount of debt they were currently accumulating with each passing second, Fatih, on the other hand, was boarding a plane heading to Monaco to go and receive his 2019 F3 title along with Robert Shwartzman, who finished second, and Marcus Armstrong, who finished third that season.

Due to his current ill feelings towards the FIA, he wanted to skip it, but per the regulations, doing so would result in a fine, but also Political and Disciplinary Backlash, which was what worried him more than even the fine that he could pay easily. After that, he also had an end-of-the-year meeting with the Prometheus research center that he had founded in 2017, when he asked his mother to help him fund it, for an update on all of the improvements they had made in the areas he had commissioned research for.

The VIX, officially known as the Cboe Volatility Index, is a real-time market index that measures the stock market’s expectation of near-term volatility. It is widely referred to as Wall Street’s ”Fear Index” or ”Fear Gauge” because its value typically spikes when investors are panicking and stock prices are falling.A Credit Default Swap (CDS) is a financial derivative that acts as an insurance policy against a borrower defaulting on their debt. It allows investors to buy or sell protection on the creditworthiness of a specific company, country, or pool of debt. In institutional finance, a CDS is the primary tool used by hedge funds and Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to execute massive market short positions.Billionaire investor Bill Ackman generated a $2.6 billion profit from a $27 million investment in February 2020 by anticipating that global COVID-19 lockdowns would cause corporate bankruptcies to skyrocket. Operating through his firm, Pershing Square, he used the $27 million to buy ”naked” Credit Default Swaps (CDS)—essentially buying cheap default insurance—on a massive $71 billion pool of investment-grade and high-yield corporate bonds. Because he did not actually own the underlying bonds, he was purely speculating; when the pandemic hit weeks later and corporate default panic peaked, the market value of his insurance contracts exploded exponentially, allowing him to sell the CDS contracts back to the market at a historic premium before any actual defaults even occurred.