Risk Seeking

See: Risk Lover. See: Risk of Ruin.

You were cautious juuuust before the 2008/9 mortgage crisis crash tthat almost ended the Western World. You were not risk-seeking then, as you converted most of your long equity positions into cash or bought long-lead puts against them to hedge your positions. But in mid-2009, when it became clear that the world was not, in fact, ending, you changed your tune. To risk-seeking rather than risk-avoiding.

So you margined as much of your portfolio as you could, and went levered-long to risk. As the markets went up and recovered from the brutal beating they'd taken, you were amply rewarded for having sought out risk, i.e. invested in the most fragile companies, those staring bankruptcy in the gaping maw. The companies leveraged 5:1 debt-to-EBITDA. So when they recovered and went from 4x EBITDA to 12x, with leverage, you made 30-50 times your money in just a half decade.

Yeah, that math works. Good work if you can get it. And have the Brunswicks to pull it off.