I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research
(hindenburgresearch.com)754 points by toomuchtodo 3 days ago
754 points by toomuchtodo 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:
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).
> 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.
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
> 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.
They are planning to release their methodology. Buried in the article:
> Beyond my own desire for relief, it also feels selfish to keep the knowledge we’ve accumulated trapped within our small team. I have more than enough. In the past several years we’ve been flooded with thousands of messages from many of you asking how we do what we do, or whether you can join the team. I read them all and I’ve been trying to figure out how to respond in a way that can answer everyone—so over the next 6 months or so I plan to work on a series of materials and videos to open-source every aspect of our model and how we conduct our investigations.
Aside from the obvious risk of short selling is the tornado of lawsuits and threats that arise from targeting shady companies.
Just because some company is accused shenanigans or breaking the law doesn't mean they won't try to litigate you out of existence.
Or that they don't have associates with baseball bats who might visit you in the night to discuss your "bad choices".
It takes some real minerals.
What they do isn't anything new or revolutionary. Short sellers have existed ever since public markets have existed. See Muddy Waters Research, Citron Research, Kynikos Associates, Pershing Square (famous for their crusade against Herbalife), Gotham Research, all of the Big Short folks. And these are just the active ones.
You need to have a very thick skin, because the shorted will come at full force against you.
I have read somewhere (long ago forgot where) that the only country this can work is America; in other countries, he would need to be scared for his actual life. Adani, for example, is in bed with India government.
Muddy Waters has been around for a while and had some high profile hits.
I believe Andrew Left and Citron Research were the first.
The impact this organization had was incredible. I doubt they would have been able to do this work if they were based out of any other country, which makes me wonder how the US legal system, regulators and law enforcement in general are not extremely corrupt. What reasons or incentives make the system work in the US? Of course there are many instances of corruption and injustice, but in comparison to almost any other country, it seems to work surprisingly well.
I think there is a really nuanced check-and-balance system that has extreme visibility for the federal legal system:
- investigators need approval from a prosecutor to move forward with investigations, and ultimately have to present their evidence in sales calls to their boss/peers. It’s a lot of red tape.
- prosecutors have bosses and reputations to uphold, they don’t want to take on risk.
- judges act as a procedural review for the prosecutor and watchdog for civil liberties
- the defense is red teaming the prosecutor and investigators for fraud etc
- the appeals court acts as a second level review for everyone + original judge
- it’s all public so journalists can poke around.
There are many reasons for this but primarily its simply that it is a wealthy country with a functioning legal system. US courts are generally fair; if biased. This has changed with many recent rulings by the SCOTUS. But there exists a culture of generally respecting laws (and an apparatus to enforce those laws).
> I doubt they would have been able to do this work if they were based out of any other country
Here's a British one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceroy_Research
There were a _number_ of British and German ones involved in the whole Wirecard mess.
Hindenburg's probably the world's most prominent, but there's nothing about the model that inherently requires being in the US.
And those German short-sellers (and to a lesser extent their British counterparts) were aggressively bullied by their local government market regulators https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/germanys-long-lon...
I have lost literally hundreds of thousands of $ trying to short obvious frauds and scams.
I have made all that back and more by instead going long things that are cheap + growing.
Being a bear pays off 1% of the time, and the act of trying to time it actually changes the window so just be an optimist and get rich.
Usually big established companies that've been unfairly beaten down and financials don't have any red flags. I look at social chat/analyst chat also but mostly only to see if/how many people/bots are talking not really to see what they are saying.
For example, I hold oversized bags of Boeing, Pfizer, and Google right now (these are new-ish positions ~3-4m in)
If I'm wrong, I try to get out asap. If I'm right, I try to never sell.
That's not how that works. They take out short positions and then release the info to profit off the drop when they announce. Announcing publically is how they make their profit, not them letting you in on it. Informational advantage is their entire strategy.
I mean that's the whole business of a short seller.
Take a big short position, then spread the bad news. Hopefully, it's true: the stock drops, and you make a mint. If you fail to spread the news, or you don't get the facts right, the stock goes up and you lose.
I believe Hindenburg Research's most notable expose was on Adani, yet he’s still standing strong. Perhaps the closure could somehow be tied to Trump’s comeback—just a thought. That said, corporate fraud is an endless cycle, and their work might inspire countless others to pursue similar research and investment ventures.
Literally every time I shorted (our bought puts) I lost money. One particular short of Beyond Meat (via puts) I was right about eventually, just not in the timeframe needed. I knew Beyond Meat was BS but unable to sustain the losses as it kept climbing in a complete bubble.
Oh, that's a shame---at least from my perspective as a reader---but Nate seems to be quite ok, and I guess it makes sense to quit when you're "winning". As a victim of burnout, I wish I had that insight too.
At least we still have Coffeezilla and Data Colada!
From their About page
"...Hindenburg Research specializes in forensic financial research.
...we believe the most impactful research results from uncovering hard-to-find information from atypical sources. In particular we often look for situations where companies may have any combination of: ... • Undisclosed related-party transactions..."
I would love to see whether Bayesian inference can be applied to quantitatively establish when "there's a there there' in any given situation. When is the unlikelihood of a coincidence transcend beyond the level of background noise?
No, it was being investigated by the DOJ and SEC for fraud and scheming just like its sister company Citron and Andrew Left, which has been indicted. So Nate has decided to shutdown before he gets subpoenas to preserve the records.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t short selling only harm bad companies? If a strong company comes under selling pressure from shorts, then it can buy its own stock back at a discount.
wow! I've always thought of them as some ruthless finance people with huge egos. This piece made me think differently. Very moving read!
Fraud and deception are common. Just consider Tesla for instance.
In an upcoming age of oligarchy, regulation will be adapted to suit business owners. As an example, it seems that Gautam Adani is friendly with Trump.
What will be the impact on the SEC? What are future scenarios of fraud enabled by weaker regulations?
But this is a regretable, but wise move. Love the fact that he linked a DJ set.
Godspeed, Hindenburg folks! I started to really appreciate your work, when I read Dan McCrum and the other Alphaville writers at the FT.
> In an upcoming age of oligarchy
oligarchy has been going on for a long time, regardless of political affiliations.
to see why i say this, look at (no relation) https://quiverquant.com , and you'll see professional politicians with sub $180k salaries worth tens of millions of dollars, for just one example.
'X has been happening for a long time' is an old tactic to hide bad things behind some undefined excuse of inevitability, and discourage any action. Corruption has been happening for a long time, but that doesn't mean it can't get much worse or, through our action, much better.
What does it even mean? What does it matter if it's been 'going on for a long time'?
Andrew Left of Citron got indicted last summer for securities fraud (shorting, settling to cash in in the gains, and lying that he's still short). My first reaction was are they bailing before someone starts sniffing around, but have to say either the author is a total sociopath or he's sincerely just ready for something else in his life. Which I can understand.
Everything had its positive and negative side. Hindenburg sure made some bold calls that led to unraveling some frauds & Ponzi. But they're also in it for money.
No point applying a moral coat of paint. He took on listed Adani in India but I respect those that take on mining mafia & exploiters of slave labour where there's no pot of gold if you win & end up dead in ditch if you don't.
It was easy target to pick - Soros had openly painted a target on his back and his entire ecosystem was working overtime. Reasons purely political - his perceived closeness to Modi who is hated more than Orban + Trump put together by the ecosystem.
It was laughable anyway as Adani was very rich even before Modi was known outside his own state. And that was exactly like all other tycoons in Asia - greasing palms that needed it. These businessmen know who's in power, who's likely to & who's there to stay.
Yeah wish him good health to enjoy his wealth. And let us enjoy the collateral damage caused to "frauds" he thought lucrative enough to pick.
Given the number of ultrarich and powerful people that already hate the Hindenberg folks... my guess would be that there is some calculus here about the incoming U.S. presidential administration's enmity towards whistleblowers and their prior statements about changing libel laws in the U.S.
Um, yes.
Starting next week, it's open season on suckers. It's going to be like the glory days of the Tel Aviv binary options scammers, who at one time were 40% of the Israeli finance sector and had good political connections.[1] Crypto deregulation is coming. No more CFPB enforcement! No more SEC enforcement!
There are still people who haven't lost money in crypto yet who can be targeted. They're all little people. No one will help them. Just pay off some influencers and start up your scam.[2]
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/topic/binary-options-fraud/
>It's going to be like the glory days of the Tel Aviv binary options scammers, who at one time were 40% of the Israeli finance sector and had good political connections.
When I started at Goldman Sachs 25 years ago, I was told early on of an "Israeli discount" and "Canadian discount"; that is, investors were more skeptical of companies based in those countries.
I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if what you said is the cause?
Musk famously hates short sellers, the Trump Social CEO has done the "blame the short sellers" bit, Eric Trump is hyping crypto coins, Trump himself is eager to take credit whenever the market goes up... I think it's almost guaranteed that they'll target short sellers specifically at some point. They're a easy target to blame, and divert attention from the the fact that they are actually fleecing investors right at this moment.
Soon the only crime will be exposing fraud.
Hindenburg exposes hucksters and frauds. Hucksters and frauds have now taken over the highest office. He just sees the writing on the wall and needs to get out now.
There is a very fine line between investigative journalism and market manipulation. They treaded it pretty carefully so far, but were bound to slip up sooner or later. Especially now that they are prominent enough that HFT bots are instantly shorting every company they mention in new posts. Quitting while they are ahead is a good move.
I don't think Hindenburg is scared of being sued, otherwise they wouldn't have been in the business in the first place. Their investigations are extremely thorough, with everything fully documented, mostly from public records, for the specific purpose that if/when they show up in court, they can be confident of the basis of their findings.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/adani-group-threate...
P.S. where did you see Block suing Hindenburg? The closest thing I can find is 'Block said it intended to “explore legal action” against Hindenburg, who sought to “deceive and confuse” Block investors to “profit from a declined stock price.”' which is just PR speak
>I don't think Hindenburg is scared of being sued, otherwise they wouldn't have been in the business in the first place
They should be. If doesn't matter how well everything is documented or how above-board the company is when the courts turn into kangaroo courts for a thoroughly corrupt administration. They're right to get out now while they still can.
How do you explain their report on Supermicro? It seems nothing was wrong there after all. From https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2024120275/why-...
> the committee confirmed previously stated findings that there was "no evidence of fraud or misconduct on the part of management or the board of directors."
Would that really be a factor? It's hard to call it slander when you agree to pay the fine.
Good.
After the details of the sources on the absurd hitjob they did on Super Micro came out recently, they should be deeply embarrassed.
The whole thing was basically just the claims of a disgruntled sales manager, of very dubious character, fluffed up to seem like there was some legion of internal whistleblowers.
Not to mention relying heavily on mixing in details of long settled previous issues at the company to lend credence to the dubiously evidenced current claims of malfeasance. Shameful profiteering on the part of Hindenburg there.
They should have nipped that report in the bud instead of sloshing it out the door.
Yea the Adani report already had me skeptical but the Supermicro hit job, and the fact that multiple independent auditors haven’t found the same claimed problems in their accounting, has made Hindenburg look a lot more shady. This to me looks like an incompetent firm that profited from big short positions and potentially false reports, now closing shop so there’s no assets to claim in a lawsuit.
Adani Group which was charged in November by the SEC for bribery?
https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/adani-group-shares-p...
The SEC is charging them with it (as did the DOJ in parallel) - but that’s not the same as a judgment. The way this works is the SEC accuses, and it will need to then go through the legal process of our justice system (or settle it separately). But as of right now, the Adani group hasn’t been found guilty of anything.
The main issue raised in Hindenburg’s report is around accounting. It is too early to draw any final conclusions since I don’t think independent audits have been conducted yet. The Adani group consists of many companies in many industries - some of them did switch auditors after the report came out and financial filings have continued normally since those changes. I don’t think any smoking gun has come out yet that actually proves the accusations from Hindenburg.
Thanks for providing a definition of a commonly understood legal term that I used.
Here’s a screenshot of the accusations of bribery contained in the Hindenburg report: https://imgur.com/a/cta3zuj
If you take even a cursory glance at the report, the main issues are not accounting.
It is interesting that their 'About' page mentions a lot of their work but no mention of Adani - which would have arguably been their biggest.
Has anyone else publicly copied the Hindenburg investigation/financial model? It's not proprietary AFAIK.