Bill Hwang after Archegos, from Wall Street disaster to prison and appeals

Archegos was one of those financial stories that briefly terrified Wall Street and then seemed to disappear into complexity. The family office collapsed in March 2021 after using total return swaps and borrowed money to build outsized positions in a handful of stocks. Banks lost more than $10 billion when those bets imploded. For a long time, the collapse felt more like a technical market event than a human accountability story. That changed in 2024. A jury convicted founder Bill Hwang and former CFO Patrick Halligan of fraud. In November 2024, Hwang was sentenced to 18 years in prison, while Halligan received eight years. Even then, the story did not truly end. Reuters reported in March 2026 that the SEC had made substantial progress toward settling its remaining civil case, and that both men were still free on bail while appealing. That gives the story a very different shape than the one most readers remember. Archegos was not just a spectacular market failure. It became a major white-collar criminal case with a long afterlife.