Harry Markopolos figured out Madoff's fraud in four hours — then spent nine years being ignored by the SEC.

In November 2005 he submitted a 21-page memo naming 29 red flags, and the SEC still closed the case without verifying a single trade.

It took Lehman Brothers collapsing in September 2008 to drain Madoff's cash and force the confession.

When FBI agents arrived on December 11, 2008, Madoff greeted them in his bathrobe and said: 'There is no innocent explanation.'

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In 1960, Bernie Madoff started a brokerage with $5,000 from lifeguarding — by 1999 his fake books showed $7.1 billion under management.

He served as NASDAQ Chairman three times while Frank DiPascali fabricated thousands of trades daily on a hidden floor of the Lipstick Building.

In 1992, the SEC knocked on the door, Madoff wired $440 million overnight to make them go away, and regulators closed the case with zero charges.

This is Chapter 1 of the largest fraud in financial history — before anyone was listening.

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On October 29, 1929, Jesse Livermore held over one million shares short and made nearly $100 million in a single week — roughly $3 billion today.

He had predicted the crash months earlier, secretly placing positions through more than 100 brokers so no one would know. But this wasn't his first fortune, and it wouldn't be his last loss — by 1914 he had already gone bankrupt owing brokers over $1 million, and his creditors voluntarily cancelled his debts just to keep him trading.

The Great Bear of Wall Street is one of the most extraordinary — and most tragic — stories in financial history.🎧 Part of the Sleepy Stock Market series — financial history told as documentary audio.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━SLEEPY STOCK MARKETFall asleep to the greatest stories in financial history.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#JesseLivermore #WallStreet #StockMarketCrash #1929Crash #GreatDepression #TradingHistory #FinanceHistory #GreatBear #StockMarket #BlackTuesday

At fourteen, Jesse Livermore talked his way into a Boston brokerage for six dollars a week — and secretly started beating the house.

By sixteen, he had made his first thousand dollars trading in illegal off-exchange gambling dens called bucket shops, using only pattern analysis he had developed in two handwritten notebooks.

His first recorded profit was $3.12 on a Burlington stock trade in 1892. He was eventually banned from every bucket shop in Boston by name before he was old enough to vote.🎧 Part of the Sleepy Stock Market series — financial history told as documentary audio.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━SLEEPY STOCK MARKETFall asleep to the greatest stories in financial history.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#JesseLivermore #WallStreetHistory #StockMarket #TradingHistory #FinanceHistory #BoyPlunger #BucketShop #Investing #StockTrader #FinancialHistory

Part 2 of the John Law story.

By December 1719 John Law was the second most powerful man in France: Contrôleur Général des Finances, head of the Banque Royale, and master of the Compagnie des Indes. Mississippi Company shares had climbed from 500 to 18,000 livres in eighteen months.

The word *millionaire* was coined in Paris coffee houses to describe the fortunes his paper had created.Then on New Year's Day 1720 the Prince de Conti arrived at the bank with three empty wagons and demanded gold.

Within a year, the architect of modern central banking fled Paris in an Italian abbot's robes. He died nine years later in Venice — owning eighty-four paintings and debts of one and a half million livres.

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Part 1 of the John Law story.

In 1694 a twenty-two-year-old Scottish goldsmith's son killed a London dandy in a duel, was sentenced to death, then vanished from Newgate Prison five days later.

He resurfaced in Amsterdam studying the Wisselbank, then in Paris with a radical idea: paper money. By 1716 the convicted murderer had opened the first central bank in French history. Within three years he controlled France's currency, its treasury, and its colonial empire — and coined the word *millionaire*.🎧

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In 1920, Charles Ponzi promised 50% returns in 45 days — and 40,000 people handed him their savings.

By July 1920 he was collecting $1 million per day, but auditors found just $61 worth of postal coupons when his scheme required 160 million.

When Ponzi was arrested on August 12, 1920, investors had lost $20 million — over $300 million in today's money — and most never recovered more than 30 cents on the dollar.

The same mechanics resurfaced in Bernie Madoff's 2008 collapse, which cost investors $18 billion.

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Bruce Kovner borrowed $3,000 on a MasterCard in 1977 to bet on soybean futures — and it changed everything.

A Harvard dropout and former NYC taxi driver, Kovner founded Caxton Associates in 1983 with just $12 million and turned it into one of the most profitable hedge funds in history, returning $12.8 billion to clients by 2010.

At its peak, Caxton managed over $14 billion, posting a 55.6% average annual return in its first decade. The man who once drove cabs now chairs his own family office and donates rare music manuscripts to Juilliard.

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In 2015, Michael Platt returned $8 billion to investors and shut Blue Crest Capital to the public — then reportedly made over 50% per year.

Born in Preston in 1968, Platt built BlueCrest from zero into a $35 billion hedge fund giant after leaving JP Morgan with co-founder William Reeves in 2000.

His fund returned 54% during the 2008 financial crisis while competitors collapsed. By 2025, his net worth reached $18.8 billion — built almost entirely after he stopped managing other people's money.

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Bill Ackman spent five years and $760 million trying to prove Herbalife was a pyramid scheme — and lost.

In December 2012, Ackman held a one-billion-dollar short position and delivered an eight-hour public presentation accusing the company of fraud.

Carl Icahn took the opposite side, buying 25 million shares in January 2014, and turned Ackman's crusade into a $1 billion profit for himself.

The FTC fined Herbalife $200 million in 2017 but never declared it a pyramid scheme — meaning Ackman was arguably right about the damage, and still lost everything on the trade.

🎧 Part of the Sleepy Stock Market series — financial history told as documentary audio.

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