Comment by steveBK123
3 days ago
It's a hard business to make money in. Shorting tends to be intrinsically harder because the market goes up over time and Americans are generally optimists. Plus the last 2 years we've seen 20+% market moves upwards.
Despite it being a necessity for functioning markets, when you are short, seemingly everyone is against you - business management, regulators, media, etc.
Not surprised to see them bow out. Chanos did so last year.
This is one of the reasons frauds go on so much longer than you'd expect - no one wants to hear the truth.
People have this idea that short sellers are market manipulators who conspire to wipe out innocent day traders' life savings and trigger mass layoffs with the stroke of a pen (hence the term "financial terrorism," which is absolutely comical in its hyperbole but used with complete sincerity by the anti-short crowd), but like tines said, it's a risky business that requires lots of research that frequently goes nowhere with limited upside and uncapped potential losses. The amount of times they and other short sellers publish damning evidence on a company only for the stock to shoot back as soon as the company releases a "nothing to see here" non-response really shows the difficulty in making money in the space (and how much people want to bury their heads in the sand).
Given the regulatory environment we are heading into, I expect short selling will become an even riskier business since the SEC isn't going to be prosecuting fraud anymore (or rather, they'll be doing even less than they are now), making it much easier to sic the lawyers on firms like Hindenburg. Even though this isn't their stated reason for bowing out, I wouldn't be surprised or hold it against them if it was a factor.
I think the prospect of an impending SEC or other investigation is only one factor in stocks losing value.
They highlight inflated sales and financial irregularities like a chain of companies that engage in self-dealing, but are portrayed as independent to hide their real ownership, and so on.
If you believe what they say, your faith in the company is shaken because they're pulling a con job on you to invest in them and believe their story. If the SEC investigates that just supports the claim that it's a con.
If they don't investigate - for whatever reason - it doesn't mean that it's not a con and you won't lose all of your money believing it.
So a change in the regulatory environment is only one element.
For example, the Modhi/Adani thing is outside the reach of the SEC. And after watching a piece on it, apparently shorting it was amazingly tricky, and they had to go through some Singaporean markets to arrange a short position.
SEC Commissioners turn over slowly. It is not quite as independent as Fed, but more independent than most agencies.
Matt Levine always has the good stuff, but he had commentary on a profile of Jim Chanos (the lesson not necessarily being specific to Chanos) that always sticks with me. The profile that discussed the idea that the real sort of 'secret sauce' was that the combination of Chanos' main funds were like 190% long, and then 90% the short stuff he wan known for.
On its surface, nothing crazy for long/short funds, the notable part was that basically all the effort was on the short side, and the long side was implied to be very humdrum. And the short book had like negative returns over a long period. It just struck me as a really elegant (if extreme) example of what uncorrelated returns can do if you do somehow have some edge over time.
And I'm not sure what Hindenburg's holistic picture is, but whether rightly or wrongly now I usually assume most of the kind of very public shorts operate similarly. I was never really on board with the "short sellers are evil" train of thought, but I did believe, "oh these very public short sellers only short things, they just go around all the time thinking everything is awful". And my assumption now is that they are like, kind of really theatric long/short funds.
Matt had some line like if you extremely good at something, you can get rich doing it, even if it loses money. As long as it's not correlated.
I’d wager a big part of how they make money is as SEC whistleblowers. It’s not as huge of money as shorting is - but it’s typically a single digit percentage of the recovered fines. Considering these guys nailed a company that defrauded people of $3 BILLION dollars, they’d net $30 mil from turning that company in even if the payout is only 1%.
The SEC has a policy of paying out part of recovered fines as bounties to whistleblowers to align incentives. If your company is doing something sketchy, you get a payout by doing the right thing.
I’m not a lawyer but I think that mechanism works just as well if you’re an external reporter of fraud. SEC makes money and pays you for your diligent forensic auditing.
Its 10% to 30%
where did you get 1% from, its a really good bounty system to clean up the markets and you get to be anonymous if you use a lawyer, the trick is to get the SEC to prioritize it. They are now inundated after some large payouts made the news in financial circles
Large indeed - there was a $279 million payout to a bounty hunter in 2023:
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-89
Do you have any evidence/links that discuss this? I'd be surprised that they'd get any whistleblower fees, because they themselves aren't actually the whistleblower. E.g. a whistleblower usually refers to actual insiders with private knowledge that then "blow the whistle". In Hindenburg's case, they basically just did research anyone is capable of doing (although in many cases, after they became known, they did have whistleblowers reach out to them).
This bounty program doesn’t require being an employee
Astute observers and outsiders - doing the same thing prolific short sellers do - have received some of the biggest bounty payouts
The source is on the SEC’s bounty payout page
> Shorting tends to be intrinsically harder because the market goes up over time and Americans are generally optimists
Also, with shorting the best you can do is double your money (if the stock goes to 0), while you can lose an unlimited amount (as there’s no cap on a rising stock); whereas with going long, you can only lose all your money (again, if it goes to 0), but you can gain an unlimited amount.
Except for leverage... but the general point remains that the upside is capped and the downside in theory is not.
This is incorrect. The way shorting works is you borrow a stock (and keep paying premium for the duration) and sell it
Premiums are usually small, so you can make many multiples of paid premium
And since their business model is releasing the findings, which in turn makes the stock drop, they can time their short position very well and don't need to pay premiums for long
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "your money" in "double your money" (and I was unclear). You can only earn the value of the stocks you borrow. When trading long, the gain is unlimited.
According to Investopedia, "the Federal Reserve Board requires all short sale accounts to have 150% of the value of the short sale at the time the sale is initiated" so it's the same principle as going long with margin. You can leverage yourself but there's a limit.
8 replies →
See put options.
The song remains the same - the stock can only go to zero. The upside of a put is effectively capped at (strike price minus stock price) * 100. Going long via shares or calls is unlimited.
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> Shorting tends to be intrinsically harder because the market goes up over time and Americans are generally optimists.
... and the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
I remember once I tried shorting a stock, of a market leader in my area. I knew the field well enough to see that they were trying to fudge some numbers and their quarter was _not_ as good as they had claimed it to be.
But sadly the market didn't see this and the stock went up. E*Trade started pushing me to cover my positions, and eventually I ended up losing a 5-figure sum (nothing earth-shattering, but still a good chunk of my cash).
After I had bought it all back, slowly the market realized what I had seen and the stock dropped as I had expected. Unfortunately I did not have the deep pockets to stick around long enough; all I was left with was a hole in the wallet and a hard lesson learned.
Somebody say the thing please