How about them apples?

[Gregmal]

3 minutes ago, ValueArb said:

Where do we draw the red line? Can he sell at $28 the next day? The next week? Can he sell at $60 moments later? $40? $30? Can he sell moments later at $28 if he's found a much better investment he needs to fund? Or for a margin call? Or for a personal emergency?

 

What's so special about $28 and moments later? Who decides and how?

I think it just needs to come down to intent. This guys was clearly using the media to pump and dump. If his strategy didnt have anything to do with hoodwinking people, he wouldnt have needed to execute it the way he did. 

 

Its hardly an industry secret that everyone knew his research sucked and was fairly fictitious for one reason. 

 

$28 itself is arbitrary outside of the fact that he jawboned about $65-100 and said he wasnt selling and then sold for no reason, minutes later, seemingly just because....HE manipulated the market upward with his rhetoric. 

 

I agree on the evil tentacles of big government, but my issue is also how the lawyers and rich guys like this distort all of this with such legal arguments and technicalities. The 30,000 ft view is that this guy lied and colluded with others to move stock prices very temporarily so he could dump after pumping. 

[ValueArb]

Secondly, Levine catches the SEC with charging Left for fraud over his CRON short call, despite CRON hitting his price target and the SEC ITSELF CHARGING CRON WITH FRAUD!

 

Quote

I am not saying this is the law — I don’t think it is — it’s just a statement of my sympathies. And I have not closely studied his track record, and I don’t know how honest and diligent his calls actually were; again, the SEC has messages that suggest he might not have been all that honest and diligent. But we did talk about one call, when Left decided to short a Canadian cannabis company called Cronos Group in 2018. “I have a hot voice in cannibas,” Left told an associate; “Let’s take a vantage [sic] of it.”[3] So, says the SEC:

Later that same day, Left published a report and sent a tweet to his readers recommending that they sell CRON and that the true valuation of the company was $3.50 per share: “$CRON tgt price $3.5. Everything that is contaminated about the Cannabis space. ALL HYPE with possible securities fraud.” The tweet linked to the report which was titled, “Cronos: The Dark Side of The Cannabis Space.”

I wrote:

Weirdly the SEC does not get into this, but Cronos closed at $12.74 per share on Aug. 29, 2018, the day before Left’s report. It closed at $9.12 on Aug. 30, after the report came out, a 28% drop. It then rallied, getting as high as $23.70 in March 2019. But then it mostly went down. It hit Left’s $3.50 price target in early 2022, and closed at $2.42 yesterday. It has never reported an operating profit. It took a while, and many readers who shorted the stock presumably lost money, but was Left … right?

But somehow I missed that the SEC charged Cronos with fraud in 2022. It’s not the biggest fraud in the world, and it happened starting in 2019 (so after Left’s report), but still. The SEC says that Left was committing fraud when he said that Cronos would go to $3.50 and might be committing securities fraud, even though Cronos went to $3.50 and (in the SEC’s view) committed securities fraud. 

 

[ValueArb]

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

I think it just needs to come down to intent. This guys was clearly using the media to pump and dump. If his strategy didnt have anything to do with hoodwinking people, he wouldnt have needed to execute it the way he did. 

 

I agree but the SEC should have to actually demonstrate intent. They can't just say he recommended something then quickly dumped it, ergo fraud. They should be forced to demonstrate he knew his research was wrong/faked/misleading and that he intended to mislead people. That's much harder, but the bar should be high for criminal convictions, especially when they impinge on free speech rights.

 

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

 

Its hardly an industry secret that everyone knew his research sucked and was fairly fictitious for one reason. 

 

If that was true you are the only one who knows it. He's got a stellar record of finding frauds and good shorts. Doesn't mean its a perfect record, but I don't know anyone who thinks his research "sucked". 

 

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

 

$28 itself is arbitrary outside of the fact that he jawboned about $65-100 and said he wasnt selling and then sold for no reason, minutes later, seemingly just because....HE manipulated the market upward with his rhetoric. 

 

I agree on the evil tentacles of big government, but my issue is also how the lawyers and rich guys like this distort all of this with such legal arguments and technicalities. The 30,000 ft view is that this guy lied and colluded with others to move stock prices very temporarily so he could dump after pumping. 

 

Because it's better a thousand pumpers go free than an innocent spend years in prison. The bar has to be high and the evidence has to be very strong. If you think jawboning and then selling is all that should be enough for a conviction, ask yourself why hundreds of reddit accounts on WallStreetBets haven't been doxxed by the Feds and their owners put up on federal charges.

[Gregmal]

4 minutes ago, ValueArb said:

If that was true you are the only one who knows it. He's got a stellar record of finding frauds and good shorts. Doesn't mean its a perfect record, but I don't know anyone who thinks his research "sucked". 

I dunno how many people who Ive run into over the years who've had great laughter about his 3 step investing strategy...SCREAM publicly about a great sounding fundamental story 2) exit the position shortly thereafter even though virtually nothing has changed 3) claim he called it......

[Gregmal]

8 minutes ago, ValueArb said:

I agree but the SEC should have to actually demonstrate intent. They can't just say he recommended something then quickly dumped it, ergo fraud. They should be forced to demonstrate he knew his research was wrong/faked/misleading and that he intended to mislead people. That's much harder, but the bar should be high for criminal convictions, especially when they impinge on free speech rights.

You can very quickly get the the bottom of "intent" when you view trading records. For instance, Carston Block if he was covering Fairfax on its brief dip, following his own media blitz....anomaly? I doubt it. 

 

The lawyers wanna get us caught up in, "was the research right" or "what was the long term outcome"....you can clearly see intent by....when was the position put on, when was it closed, and what was done in between. With some of these guys theres a clear and deliberate pattern/organizational scheme to it. 

[ValueArb]

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

You can very quickly get the the bottom of "intent" when you view trading records. For instance, Carston Block if he was covering Fairfax on its brief dip, following his own media blitz....anomaly? I doubt it. 

 

The lawyers wanna get us caught up in, "was the research right" or "what was the long term outcome"....you can clearly see intent by....when was the position put on, when was it closed, and what was done in between. With some of these guys theres a clear and deliberate pattern/organizational scheme to it. 

 

Again, he can have many reasons to cover early, it's not evidence of fraud and it shouldn't be. Fraud is intentionally misleading research, how they traded after is immaterial.

 

There is absolutely nothing unethical or immoral and with publicly saying company X is worthless because it's a fraud, and then covering an hour later to take a 7% profit. And it should never be illegal unless the research was fraudulent.

 

His risk levels, his business model, etc should just be his business not ours. If he wants to get by taking a lot of small profits to keep risk low, that's fine.

[thepupil]

one reason to cover as an activist short is that you can find yourself overly successful in attracting other people shorting and risk borrow drying up, so if you got a portion of your profit in exchange for sharing your thesis, better to take the bird in hand.

 

[UK]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/short-seller-andrew-left-s-deleted-tweets-reappear-in-fraud-case

[Spekulatius]

So Andrew Left picks created huge Alpha:

 

[Paarslaars]

Well he had several Mag 7's in there... Don't think that had anything to do with his tweets.

[UK]

12 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

So Andrew Left picks created huge Alpha:

 

 

Great, except for a fact, that instead of just going long these names, he now has a chance going to a jail...:)