| Welcome to Bw Daily, the new Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Programing note: Bw Daily will take a holiday break and return on Jan. 3. See you in 2023.  Scott Minerd Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP "Never hire an optimistic bond fund manager" That's the advice that Scott Minerd always gave. I've covered Scott, the 63-year-old bond investing giant who died this week of a heart attack, for the nine years I've worked at Bloomberg. The big lesson I took from him wasn't about making big, bold calls, but the importance of risk management. Investing in bonds isn't like investing in equities, where you typically assess the upside of any given wager. No, bonds are different. The big idea is not to lose money wherever possible. That's why optimism would fail you. A bond investor's secret is to see every possible way a bet can go wrong, and when Minerd knew the risk, he was ready to make a bold call. At the very bottom, in March 2020, he deployed about $7 billion into credit markets in a big bet that the Federal Reserve would buoy the riskiest debts. And he was right. More than a third of that sum went into some of the riskiest high-yield products that came soaring back with the Fed's support during the Covid-19 crisis. His main bond fund beat 97% of his rivals that year. He wasn't always right. He'd predicted that the S&P 500 could fall to 1,200 in the pandemic tumult. He was about 1,000 points off. But it didn't really matter because he wasn't chasing the upside. It's not that covering Minerd turned my worldview negative. But what I took from the bond titan was the most basic tenant of finance: Consider all risks. Eyes on FTX What happens when your closest colleagues turn on you? FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried is going to find out. He was released on $250 million bond after he showed up to face criminal charges suited up and unshaven at a hearing this week in Manhattan federal court. His next appearance is Jan. 3. He didn't submit a plea. But his former colleagues have. A deal with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York shows Caroline Ellison—who led the Alameda Research trading business—pleading guilty to seven counts. Gary Wang, an FTX founder, pleaded guilty to a separate set of charges. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have separately released complaints, with the SEC saying that both executives aided in a multiyear scheme to defraud investors. The CFTC said Wang created features in the code underlying FTX's crypto-trading platform that essentially allowed Alameda to maintain an "unlimited line of credit." Poorly documented loans were made to Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives to buy luxury properties and make political donations, according to the complaint naming the three executives as defendants. —Sonali Basak, Bloomberg News More on Wall Street - Ilana Weinstein, founder of executive search firm IDW Group, joined us on Bloomberg Television to discuss on the talent wars and how the hedge fund universe is shaping up for next year.
- Sachin Khajuria, a former Apollo partner who now runs Achilles Management, holds forth on private credit opportunity and the outlook for distress.
- Ron Gerber, a longtime supporter of Tesla Inc., is frustrated about Elon Musk's distractions at Twitter. He spoke to us after a public dispute broke out between the investor and the billionaire entrepreneur on the social media platform.
- Wells Fargo paid a record-breaking fine as a top consumer watchdog cracks down. The fines aren't over yet.
- Profile of Jamie Dimon, by Bloomberg's Hannah Levitt
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