He founded Allan Gray Limited in 1973 and later Orbis, building two of the most respected contrarian value managers in the world. His creed was simple: buy what others fear, and hold through the discomfort. Intensely private, he gave almost no interviews and let a multi-decade record speak for itself. This is the story of Allan Gray, South Africa's greatest investor.

In November 2021, Bitcoin hit $69,000. A digital JPEG of a pixelated ape sold for $3.4 million. The combined market cap of cryptocurrencies briefly exceeded $3 trillion. A 30-year-old in cargo shorts named Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of every business magazine on earth, called the next Warren Buffett, donating tens of millions to politicians, talking about effective altruism.

A year later, Bitcoin was at $16,000. The NFT market was a graveyard. FTX, the second largest crypto exchange in the world, valued at $32 billion, filed for bankruptcy in 11 days. Eight billion dollars of customer money was missing. SBF was arrested in the Bahamas and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.

This is the season finale of Market Mayhem — the story of the crypto bubble and FTX collapse, the most spectacular speculative mania of the modern era, and the timeless lessons four hundred years of market history have been trying to teach us.

Market Mayhem EP18 — A Complete Trader's Edge Production

📖 Get the book: https://completetradersedge.com/market-mayhem-book/

Greatest Companies — Episode 9

Almost every advanced chip on earth, in your phone, your car, and the AI data centres reshaping the world, is made by one company in Taiwan that most people have never thought about. TSMC chose to build nothing of its own and manufacture everyone else's designs instead, and that single decision made it one of the most strategically important companies on the planet.

This is the story of the foundry model, the bet on pure manufacturing, and the advantage measured in physics and decades of accumulated know-how.

The Greatest Companies series studies the businesses that built the modern world, as proof of a simple idea: every legendary company begins with an idea that looks improbable, survives a stretch where failure looks inevitable, and reaches a point where success looks obvious. The opportunity lives in the space between the second and third.

Not investment advice; for educational and historical purposes only.