Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

> [Chris Drose] wrote an article about his findings on a website called Seeking Alpha, which short sellers frequent for investment tips. The company’s stock promptly dropped 10 percent.

Drose is a professional short-seller. Assuming he was already shorting AAC, it looks like he turned a substantial profit not on the company's weakness but on his ability to publicize it among traders.

"Short and distort" is securities fraud, the mirror practice of "pump and dump". There's no particular sign that Drose distorted the situation, but I'm curious where the lines are.

Does anyone know whether misinformation is required for this practice to rise to fraud? I assume totally-factual statements about a company would be safe, but I can imagine a lot of grey areas around opinion or hypothetical statements. If a political writer shorts a company, then starts loudly calling for it to be regulated or investigated, is that fraud? How about if a politician does so, without introducing a law?

The 'pump' side of 'pump and dump' doesn't have to be misinformation, does it? Can't it just be a barrage of PR puff pieces?

I'd expect the same here. The information doesn't have to be false for it to be a hit piece designed to profit the stock-shorting author.

> The 'pump' side of 'pump and dump' doesn't have to be misinformation, does it?

Usually, it's disinformation, not misinformation, but it is possible or it to be lies of misdirection and omission rather than direct falsehoods, which may or may not literally constitute disinformation.

> The information doesn't have to be false for it to be a hit piece designed to profit the stock-shorting author.

Certainly, if you short based on not-yet-widely known true information, you want to ensure that the market discovers that information between the time that you get into the short position and the time you have to cover the short.

OTOH, trying to get the market to recognize and react to true information isn't really a “hit piece”.

The common law definition of fraud is an act of deliberate deception for the purposes of personal gain. Both elements must be true for an act to constitute fraud. If you say "I'm shorting x stock because of y" and you reasonably believe y to be true, then you're almost certainly acting lawfully. If you don't hold a position, you can say what you like about a company without the risk of committing fraud, because you don't stand to gain from your actions (although you may be guilty of libel). If you make public statements about a company and fail to disclose a financial interest, there's an inherent element of deception, regardless of the truthfulness of your statements.

Probably not fraud, if the accusations are true. This sounds similar to what Bill Ackman did when his fund shorted Herbalife - he started a campaign suggesting Herbalife was illegal and demanding an investigation on the company supposedly illegal practices. [1]

1 https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1505px65dmmnr...

How is this not illegal?

It's not illegal if it's information that isn't libelous, because revealing true illegal conduct and taking legal action to stop it is considered desirable, and regulation that discourages that by removing a strong incentive is considered actively harmful.

If the information is libelous, well, then it is illegal.

It's not libel if it's true, but securities fraud laws go far beyond "don't lie".

At least in the presence of a fiduciary relationship, offering true information can still be legally risky if it's done for the benefit of the broker instead of their client. Drose and Ackman are considerably safer because they're just making public statements, but there are quite a lot of ways to break the law around trading outside of actual libel.

In case the comment below is unclear-because you make sure everything you say is TRUE

That's a pretty murky grey area, though. I remember the articles about aspects of loot boxes making them like gambling, and how that could make them illegal.

It's really difficult to say that's not true, and by throwing the weasel-word "could" into the sentence you do a lot to protect yourself from consequences.

welcome to America. This is why newspapers have legal departments. Personally, I'd rather have to worry about #fakenews and PR and spin rather than have to live in a where journalists fear prosecution from the rich and powerful for errors in their stories...like in the UK. The grey area is an intentional part of american jurisprudence, designed to protect the press and hopefully safeguard democracy. By making a wide grey area we put the burden of proof on the plaintiff.

Also...I am looking very askance at your characterization of 'could' as a weasel word. There are a lot of shades of grey in the world and we need degrees of certainty like could to help communicate that doubt. I think there is a large gap between troubling uses of the word 'could' and the example you gave me...which seems honestly quite innocuous.

What is your point with this comment? To suggest that people can use words to communicate doubt without having a factual basis for those claims and protect themselves from legal retaliation party by an injured party?

To support this conjecture you give me an example which is CLEARLY true. Loot boxes are 100% like gambling. You give money to receive a probabilistic reward with addictive properties. Designers intentionally seek out whales who will drop money on buying many boxes chasing the irregular high.

It seems eminently reasonably that this could make them illegal in places where gambling is closely regulated...using could here seems 100% necessary to communicate that legal experts probably disagree about whether or not loot boxes and their ilk fall under these older statutes.

The argument for not making that kind of stuff illegal is it exposes the scammers pushing overpriced stocks to the public and so protects the investing public.

Shorting stocks is already dangerous enough. You’re potential losses are infinite, your profits are fixed. Obviously you can use options to mitigate risk and juice returns, but then you have to be correct on timing as well as the companies valuation.

The only time I ever shorted, was because I correctly determined Krispy Kreme’s financials didn’t add up. I lost a ton of money because most of my options expired before how misleading their financials were became clear to the market, and the stock collapsed.

The bias in the public stock market is to pump stocks. Everyone (from investment bankers to brokers to media) is incented to give out rosy forecasts and valuations for companies. CNBC has always been a pumpers paradise.

Proportionately their is very few people who short stocks and with comparatively tiny amounts of money. They have a very tough job, but it’s an important one. They literally save people from being defrauded.

It’s really important that their free speech rights not be limited or stifled. Many times they have to fight bogus libel suits from the companies, like critics did in this story. It’s to easy for companies to sue to stifle legit criticisms already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com