During this period, when XRP was plagued by rumors about the SEC's investigation into Ripple, we realized pretty early on that XRP's price was *really* reactive to headlines -- in a fairly surprising way. 
The big news obviously had big impact -- it fell a TON when that first happened. As a bit of a side note, how to size bets on that first crash? In this case, we of course were confident it was ~bad~ -- how bad?
We decided a few things:
- probably, *we* were not the people with the best handle of like, the legal landscape, to the point where we didn't think we had a "fundamental understanding" of how bad this was
- probably, it didn't matter a ton, because liquidations
- probably, *we* were not the people with the best handle of like, the legal landscape, to the point where we didn't think we had a "fundamental understanding" of how bad this was
- probably, it didn't matter a ton, because liquidations
And the latter consideration WAS the most important -- there were a TON of liquidations, as you expect for a major asset falling 10s of %s at a time. So we basically just bet as big as liquidity would let us on momentum on the way down, which ended up great.
But yeah, after the Big News, there was a bunch more little news -- things like the fourth exchange announcing they were delisting XRP, the seventh OTC desk announcing they were halting it, the third fund announcing they were selling. Each time, XRP got hit ...
... but ... why? Once 3 other American exchanges announced they were gonna distance from XRP, didn't we kinda just know beforehand that the 4th would announce the same? Alameda thought so! But the world kept selling headlines -- so we decided to KEEP selling pretty often.
We made a list of all the bad news announcements we thought were likely, and we just kinda waited for then to come out. Bittrex delisting? Hit. Grayscale removing? Hit. Etc. We got less short once these "seemed over" (this was more about intuition on timing than anything).
Ultimately? I actually think we should have just gotten way shorter. We would have had worse execution, but this was a POWERFUL trade -- we knew news was coming and we knew what would happen when it did. I think doubling and paying 2% more was predictably good, so I give us a B.
(For the record, I believe I was the one sizing these bets, so I am purely pointing out my own mistakes right now :P).
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