Short Selling
topic on 3 shows · 14 statements across 9 episodes
Cheeky Pint 
Capital Allocators 
How I Built This
14 statements about Short Selling, every show
Sundheim: Short selling opportunity is the best in his career
“I would say that the opportunity for short selling is better than it's ever been in my career.”
Sundheim: A $30B fund cannot practically short $5B companies
“If I'm thirty billion dollars, it's really, you can't really short five billion dollar companies”
Small: Short selling consumes too much time and rarely makes sense
“Very, very few people were good at it, and it took up most of your time. To get shorts. Plus you were in some ways leveraging your longs in order to justify your shorting. So it just seemed to us to make no sense to do that.”
Tepper: Short selling is a negative carry game where time works against you
“And often now with high borrow costs and all hedge funds shorting the same names, you end up paying a lot more than you would have previously. So you're running a negative carry game where time's against you.”
The Best Shorts Have Flawed Business Models or Face Bankruptcy
“I think the best shorts are ones where there's either a fundamental flaw in the business model or is ultimately going to go bankrupt.”
Cooper: Short selling requires more market sentiment feel than long investing
“Shorting is not just a mirror image of the long side. There are other things that need to be considered. And I think one important area is the kind of sentiment market feel, which I think you need more on the short side than perhaps you maybe do on the long si…”
Cook: Short alpha generation is episodic compared to steady long alpha
“What I have found over the years is that long alpha generation tends to be a little more smooth and steady, not always, but a little more smooth and steady and short alpha generation tends to be a little more episodic. So there are periods when it just rains s…”
Cook: Widespread speculation on unproven business models creates attractive short pipeline
“I'd say that the tailwinds to short selling right now are that there's been a quite a lot of speculation and quite a lot of, I think, willingness of investors to embrace Fanciful business plans with hockey stick projections that are currently unproven and in b…”
Cook: Short sellers must hold positions longer for markets to become efficient
“Really good short ideas are hard to come by and the market's pretty smart. The longer you give the market, the more likely it is to be efficient.”
Liow: First-quartile shorts are dangerous; target the second quartile instead
“The left side, we're focused on the second quartile consistently because the first quartile is extremely dangerous and very hard to replicate.”
Liow: Aravt targets 15% to 30% gains on shorts versus multiples on longs
“Like on the long side, we're playing for multiples of our capital. On the short side, we're playing for between 15 and 30%.”
Tenev: Robinhood bans short selling and naked call options trades
“You can't short sell on Robinhood. Short selling is one of the main ways that someone could lose more money than they put in. We don't offer undefined risk options trades either. So you can't sell naked calls.”
Seides: Quant investing makes fundamental short selling difficult and unsuccessful
“You have a movement of quantitative investing, and that's really making it difficult for fundamentally driven investors to short stocks and be successful.”
O'Shaughnessy: Borrow Costs and Volatility Eliminate Quantitative Short Paper Alpha
“Most of the stuff that screens as screaming shorts and in a paper portfolio works incredibly well. You have incredible problems with borrow availability, with borrowing cost, which often instantly removes the paper alpha and with volatility.”