A lot of financial frauds last way longer than people think. Madoff ran for 30+ years.

i keep seeing people talk about scams like they always collapse after 18 months. a lot of the big ones don’t. 10 years, 20 years, sometimes 30. they still blow up. you just don’t get to pick the year. madoff is the one that sticks with me because it went on forever and the guy looked completely legit while it was happening. he’d been on wall street for decades. chaired nasdaq at one point. quiet, well connected, the “trust this old guy with your family’s money” type. pitch was some stock + options strategy that apparently worked in every market. returns were smooth. drawdowns were tiny. so the money kept showing up. rich families, charities, university endowments, european private banks, the whole circus. there was no strategy. a lot of the cash never got invested. somebody wants a redemption, you pay them with the next guy’s money. statements, trade tickets, monthly performance, a bunch of that was just printed. people were already complaining to regulators in the 90s. possible the thing started in the 70s. still made it to 2008. what ended it wasn’t the SEC suddenly getting sharp. it was the crisis. everyone wanted out at the same time, new money stopped covering old money, and that was it. he told his sons the whole firm was fake. accounts showed something like $65b. a lot of that was just a number on a page. 150 years. the annoying part if you actually invest is that a long, clean track record is exactly what people use as proof. with madoff the consistency *was* the product. not saying every low-vol manager is running a ponzi. just that “it’s been working for 15 years” is not the slam dunk people think it is. anyway. if a fund or a private deal has almost no down years and nobody can explain the edge in a normal sentence, do you pass or do you still write the check?