Submitted by TheRealJugger t3_z5c5q8 in wallstreetbets
Rather self explanatory here, but if a company is a publicly complaining about the evil short sellers. It usually means that their business is either completely falling apart or they are hiding some amount of fraud making it an excellent short position.
My personal favorite was Richard Fuld of Lehmann back in 2008, I'll chop it down but if you want all the juice read To Big To Fail on this chode talking of "ThE ShORtS". Literally, when the FED and Treasury under Paulson were in the effort trying to bail them out. Fuld was screaming that his balance sheet(which was full of toxic assets that were not marked to market) was strong and it was the dang shorts bad mouthing his company... Which we all know was utter lies. It got so bad that Paulson, the secretary of the Treasury, had to sit him down and tell him to stop telling fed governors that everything was fine and it was only the shorts lol.
Another being Allied Capital that is written about by David Einhorn in his book about the saga. Where Allied capital was covering up massive amounts of fraud in one of its branches with ridiculous accounting practices. Although this one lacked the massive profit potential because the slow to act regulators uncovering the fraud.
Most recently, think of all the recent shitcos that were complaining of the shorts when they were grossly overvalued only to fall by a huge percentage. Some notables being Nikola and Shopify, if you go back on Twitter to when the Shopify CEO was complaining of shorts you could have made a fat gain taking that as a sign.
Not saying yolo once company starts complaining of shorts, but is a massive green flag for DD on a potential awesome short position.
*I would like to preface that this does not include when regarded shareholders who didn't know what a stock was 6 months prior who are complaining of the hedgies and shorts.
VisualMod t1_ixv657d wrote
>That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but you're absolutely right. When a company is complaining about short sellers, it usually means that there are serious problems with the business. It's definitely something to keep an eye out for when doing due diligence on potential investments. Thanks for sharing!