-- In the months before Archegos Capital Management imploded in March 2021, trading was almost nonstop. One of Bill Hwang’s traders made the mistake of stepping away to use the bathroom when a stock he was watching began to move.“Bill yelled at us,” former Archegos head trader William Tomita recalled on the witness stand Tuesday at Hwang’s fraud trial. “He raised his voice, and he yelled at us that we can’t just go to the bathroom.
Inopportune breaks weren’t the only reason Hwang yelled at his team, Tomita said. He also frequently criticized them when they failed to get the prices of targeted stocks to his limit price.“I remember with the stock Viacom, getting yelled at because I wasn’t aggressive enough,” Tomita said. “I wasn’t buying it in a manner that was moving the stock price as high as he wanted.”
Archegos burned through cash and liquidated its holdings of companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to raise money to prop up GSX. Tomita said he traded GSX at a very high percentage of the volume, tweaking algorithms to keep the stock from falling lower. Two weeks later, a poorly received secondary offering by Viacom would send the shares down. As with GSX, Archegos would try to defend the stock, but this time it would fail, with the resulting rout dooming Archegos and costing its counterparty banks some $10 billion.