Disclosure: Hindenburg Research does not hold positions, either long or short, in Tether, bitcoin or any cryptocurrency at the time of this press release.
I wonder why this Reaserch firm is offering such a substantial bounty for information on Tether. What's in it for them? Where will this money come from?
From their site they provide an answer (and even a "track record") [1]:
> We look for (...) man-made disasters floating around in the market and aim to shed light on them before they lure in more unsuspecting victims.
Hence it seems they're doing it for the bennefit of the public. So much for the expression "there's no such thing as a free lunch".
Presumably they would like to start a position by don't have sufficient information, and are attempting to buy that information.
Hidenburg is a short seller who takes positions in their research. See for instance their short of Nikola. While I'm sure they enjoy being helpful and that there's a reason they choose to engage in a very difficult way to earn a living, when there are easier opportunities available, their motives are hardly a mystery.
You can discount all their talk of helpfulness or assume they're just talking their book, and it doesn't really change anything.
Just because someone has something to gain, doesn't mean that their actions are corrupt.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
-Adam Smith
When Hindenburg publishes equity research, the disclosure is "you should assume that as of the publication date of any short-biased report or letter, Hindenburg Research...has a short position in all stocks (and/or options of the stock) covered herein, and therefore stands to realize significant gains in the event that the price of any stock covered herein declines."
Precisely. It's too risky to actually short the crypto complex because if the Tether fraud is true, then they can pump it to $100k or $1m or whatever they want.
But if they contribute to the unwind of a fraud of this scale, they will go down as heroes.
If people aren't buying as much Bitcoin at $100k+ (I assume you are referring to Bitcoin), then what will cause it to go to $1m? I don't think they can have a guaranteed pump like you are saying.
If a fraudulent Fed is fabricating Tethers, and some people are buying it, the price is a ruinous fiction to a short. For shorts, delusions matter in a way that they don’t for ride-it-out longs.
Not really. Markets weed out unprofitable firms. Government doesn't really care about that. On the other side, government regulates firms that engage in some harmful (open to interpretation) practice, and markets don't care about that unless it makes them unprofitable.
I am curious about how that type of activity doesn't constitute insider trading? Presumably having "bad news" would constitute material nonpublic information?
Because it's not nonpublic information. It's public information that no one else had put together the pieces on, yet.
(Contrary to some of the other commenters, you don't have to be an insider yourself to run afoul of the law. If the information is not public and you got someone to leak it to you, for example. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...)
Exactly. Did an oil company exec tell you that their sales are down before the earnings are released? That's insider trading. Did you hire a helicopter with a thermal camera to see how full their storage tanks are? That's perfectly legal.
It might be insider trading in some countries, but it isn't in America. It's perfectly legal to trade on information you found out through your own research and didn't tell anybody about.
Simply trading on MNPI is not insider trading. You must have a fiduciary duty to protect said MNPI.
If I do some analysis and reveal some MNPI for myself, it's perfectly legal to trade on that since I do not have a fiduciary duty to any publicly traded firms.
They do the equivalent of investigative journalism. Arguably everything they know is public, just no one has looked or put all the pieces together until they do a press release.
so they can trade on it before announcing it and then with the profit pay for the bounty, assuming they pay up or assuming tether falls. Tether has survived thus far everything thrown at it. The market is evidently very confident about tether.
> The market is evidently very confident about tether.
I don't see how that's a valid conclusion to draw. I would say in this case the "market" is completely codependent on Tether, and therefore are willing to overlook red flags until forced to via damage to pricing or legalities.
As qeternity pointed out in a comment [1], you want your trade to play out in a dollar denominated, clearinghouse backed financial product. You don't bet against the house in their casino (crypto exchanges), such as shorting tether.
They are fishing for edge. If they get information that they feel will be able to quickly move markets, they'll initiate a large position before dropping the release to the public. That's how they make money.
The expectation is that they will obtain large and valuable positions (either long or short) upon obtaining this information which is not (yet) known to the general public.
Perhaps they’re holding long put contracts on the Bitcoin ETF that just started trading. Their disclosure would still be true as they own contracts, not shares. An interesting coincidence with the timing.
$1 million is not that much, just for the sheer publicity Hindenburg gets. They're going to be quoted in WSJ, Economist, ... This brings new clients...
Hi ,
I have a service were we spider employers websites for jobs,
its no a list of fully remote companies , but might be helpful, plenty of jobs not visible on job boards
the author explains buying put options , not short selling.
in shortselling you borrow shares and sell them , with the promise to give the shares back to the original owner in a later date (so shortsellers hope to buy back the shares later at a lower value)
shorting means betting on falling prices, how such a bet is implemented is an implementation detail. Borrow+sell, put options or much more complex derivatives are possible.
about 20 years ago there were services like this for your newly created website. all these site they submitted to were low quality and never generated any traffic. history repeats
I was coming to find this comment. Back then, most people looked to Google PageRank[1] as the source of truth for the value of the your website. That "value" translated into a lot of interest in advertising dollars, particularly if you ran a blog with PageRank > 7.
The interesting part was that PageRank was only "recalculated" on a somewhat infrequent basis, so you ended up with tons of domains that that weren't really human readable, just gobs of regurgitated text meant to throw off any "unique" filters, and hundreds of links to outbound sites. In early iterations of the algorithm, sites like this scored highly, and those "services" that would help you build backlinks, etc. basically just plugged your domain on these trashy sites with the hope the algorithm would see this "highly rated" site linking to your site.
Maybe a little bit before that there were similar services for Shareware applications. These were typically free, or one-time purchase, however, and would submit your program to all the websites listed automatically. Although many of the sites were junk, the combination of a few good directories and the long-tail of a bunch of low traffic directories was enough to launch a new shareware program.
That's the service that came to mind for me when I read the headline.
This is so against the basics of GDPR,
all these webshops that participate risk fines for non compliance from the moment a EU citizen is being tracked. Even if these are US companies they need to comply
I experienced this kind of behavior from a UK-based company. This wasn't even necessary, because I already bought something pricey from them and just tried the checkout flow again just to show my friend the shipping prices.
I complained to their data protection officer, who basically fobbed me off and told me they did nothing wrong. A few months down the line I finally found the time to recap everything and collect the proof and complaint to the ICO?
Their response? They threw the complaint away on a technicality because it's been more than 3 (or 6, can't remember) months since my last contact with the company despite them persisting with the behavior.
> Even if these are US companies they need to comply
Only if you have an office in the EU.
Not any more than US companies need to comply with arbitrary Chinese laws, or Japanese companies need to comply with arbitrary Saudi Arabian laws. Why does the EU have special status in being able to impose laws on the US?
The EU can feel free to block the website if they don't like it. (But we know their citizens would throw a riot if they started censoring the internet, sshhh...)
However, independently of GDPR, I agree that it's wrong and that you shouldn't be saving contact information by deception. You'd lose me as a customer if you did that.
We are running https://formlets.com, wishing them the best, i can tell one thing from experience, we have a free offering too, 100% free is not sustainable,you will need payed accounts to get a sustainable business, within weeks to months (depending on the popularity) the phishing people will find your service and you will need a full time person to track them and remove the forms or your reputation will be toast.
Its a brutal market to be in.
We are currently bootstrapping formlets.com. in a very competitive Form building market. When you use remote talent you can bring your costs down to compete with players with big pockets.
As a European I lived in Argentina for a year.
At one point I took an official looking city cab at the airport and quickly realised that the driver had other intentions than getting me to my apartment.
He dropped me off in another part of town after emptying all my pockets, keeping my luggage as ransom.
It does not need to be a complex kidnapping for you to feel unsafe.
I'm really surprised by this, there is an official cab office right outside ezeiza, which gives it some legitimacy. How did you pick a cab? (i want to know which ones are actually unsafe)
Use Uber, call a radio taxi, use an app that is used by a local radio taxi or when you are actually at Ezeiza just go to one of the many stands that are right after the scanners before you go out into the main hall.
I am really careful at the points where you will find a lot of tourists like Ezeiza and the central bus station. We've got screwed by a "tapper" once, paid much more for the ride than was actually supposed because he rigged the meter. This happened just outside the bus station where they're waiting for victims from out of town that don't know the tariffs, distances etcetera.
I actually never used Uber! I assumed they were working in the greater Buenos Aires area not just the center. I'd personally take a remise over Uber any day.
It looked like a city cab, yellow and black and was front in the line of all city cabs waiting in Ezeiza. Looking back at it it was a Peugeot that was too old to be running every day.
It had the back seat door handles and window levers removed, something you only see when you are already in the car. In the end i was happy that he let me go. It cost me 200 USD ... it could have been worse.
