Short Sellers

“And at the beginning of their short report, they'll say, We've most likely covered our short report by our short position by the time you're reading this report. And so there is not only this massive financial incentive to make the post much more dramatic than…”

“This is what you do the first time you get a short seller, write a report about you. Do not respond. I know it feels so personal. I know how personal it is, but just don't respond. Let the numbers do the talking. If you get in a public fight with them, it's ju…”

“They're actually writing research on a company to get people to short it. And oftentimes those facts are incorrect. They're assumptions. They're, you know, they can be blown out of proportion for things that, again, are just for purely for profit.”

“You know, you've got similarly, the best entrepreneurs, when short sellers are like, you know, saying something, they don't want to ban short selling. They don't want short sellers to be arrested. They just prove them wrong.”

“My sense is that the short sailors render valuable services. They make or they prick the balloons which are artificially inflated or based on market manipulation and things like. So short sailors and they also risk their capital if their analysis is not believ…”

“High stock volatility is good for the long investor. Stock goes down. You have less risk on the table. More upside. It's easy to buy. Stock goes up. You have less upside and a bigger position. It's easy to sell. The opposite happens in the short side. When it …”

“I think short, short sellers are an important part of the market. I go after one specific one who's like a, like short and distorted bad faith actor, who is like this end to a left fool, who is like just unbelievable, that guy. So I, this is just like, Hey, if…”

“In my opinion, I think that short sellers are a really important part of a well-functioning market or the ability to short.”

“What I would like to do is take an extra step, which is you should hold these folks accountable the same way you'd hold an insider accountable, which is almost to the effect of like, when you put out this screed, If you make money from it should sit in escrow …”

“Reporters love getting tips from short sellers, because short sellers have a massive financial incentive to go and investigate and figure out what companies are going to fail, and that's a really good where there's smoke, there's fire for reporters.”

“Back in the day when I wrote about Enron, even other journalists said to me, well, you took a tip from a short seller. How, how could you do that?”

“Company management is biased. The analyst who has a buy rating on the stock is biased if for no other reason than confirmation bias, right? And portfolio managers who own the stock are biased, and so yes, a short seller is biased too, but everyone is.”

“In the public markets, companies are going to be sold indiscriminately in the same way that they're being bought indiscriminately. So I think that there is a big structural issue. I think that similar as we looked at vaccines when they were out of favor, today…”

“The other challenge is a little bit more subtle, which is managing a short-only portfolio has a real rebalancing issue. And if you just think about the fall of 2008 and early 2009, dedicated short sellers that might have been typically run, call it 80 or 90% s…”

“Big percent gains tend to, you know, create more big percent gains as short sellers enter too early as momentum traders pile in.”