Comment by jandrese

This is it exactly. He was running a confidence game. There are some big parallels with Bernie Madoff in fact. Spinning a story of financial genius out of a lucky break he got early on that had higher than typical returns, but in a market small enough to fly under the radar of the big players. The big difference is that SBF had less sense and let it spin out of control way too fast and hastened his own demise. At least Madoff got to live most of his life before he got sent to jail.