Hunterbrook Media Launch | Hacker News Reader

Hunterbrook Media Launch

hntrbrk.com

36 pointsTomte12 comments

How do these companies pay the bills, let alone turn a profit? I love this investigative journalism, but I like to follow the money, to understand why they investigate what they do.

“before each investigative piece is published, the newsroom would send it to Hunterbrook’s affiliated hedge fund (Hunterbrook Capital), which could trade on the news”

via Math Levine’s piece on Hunterbrook from Bloomberg earlier today: https://archive.is/search/?q=https://www.bloomberg.com/opini...

edit: archive.is appears to be down. here’s the link to the original: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedg...

If Apple has a press release stating they're reserving multiple years worth of capacity at a certain fab, but before releasing the statement, buys stock in that same company in anticipation of the stock price going up (presumably from the fab's near-guaranteed earnings and Apple's reputation)...that's legal on Apple's part?

No, there's a difference between that (using nonpublic information) and what Hunterbrook is doing (using public information).

If they are publishing a story about company A, what’s the ethics on buying in company B, where the latter is a competitor or supplier who will be affected by the story? There’s a murky line here that they haven’t necessarily crossed, but I imagine somebody has or will.

As long as the information is publicly available, it makes no difference.

Once upon a time, if you shorted publicly traded Corp Z, and then wrote an article negative about Corp Z encouraging others to do so as well, most people were fine with that as long as two things:

1) what you wrote was factual or was an analysis of public acquired information.

2) you declared your financial position on the stock as well.

Post crypto people have done neither.

But if say this new journalistic venture gets the data from public sources, and their honest about it and the hedge fund's position, it's probably fine?

The interesting problem is that reporters will get material non public information and then make it public. But now the hedge fund gets first crack at the information before it's published to the world.

That normally would be insider trading but hiring journalists somehow makes it legal? I'm not sure.

They indicate a similar strategy to Hindenberg Research [0]. They take speculative stock options on the assumption that the target of their investigation will see their stock fall after the media arm of their business publishes the investigation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39123608

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/02/hunterbrook-hedge-fund-jour...

The article goes into great detail on how they plan to fund themselves.

The short version is that they hope to profit on the stock market, from eg shorting companies before publishing a big scandals about them.

I imagine this would be a very thin line to walk, legally: proving the investigative portion was induced from publicly available information vs insider information.

Their first story: https://hntrbrk.com/uwm/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com