Activist short-seller behind Hindenburg Research will disband firm
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- Nate Anderson said he's disbanding Hindenburg Research after completing all its outstanding projects.
- Hindenburg, a short-seller founded in 2017, gained fame for its forensic financial research.
- The firm impacted major companies and plans to share its tactics publicly.
Nate Anderson, founder of the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research, is tapping out.
On Wednesday, Anderson wrote in a post titled "Gratitude" on the firm's website, "I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research. The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on," including reporting multiple cases to regulators.
"Building this has been a life's dream." But, he said, "the intensity and focus has come at the cost of missing a lot of the rest of the world and the people I care about."
Anderson launched Hindenburg in 2017 and rose to prominence in 2020 with a report saying that electric truck manufacturer Nikola Corporation had exaggerated and misrepresented its products to investors. The stock tumbled 11% in a single day, and Anderson was off to the races.
Other targets of Hindenburg's negative research and short-seller activity included Clover Health, Adani Group, and Icahn Enterprises. In each instance the entity in question saw sharp stock losses immediately after publication. The Adani Group situation was especially notable, because the market reaction to the firm's research resulted in tens of billions of dollars of lost net worth for one of Asia's richest individuals.
Unlike typical investors that seek to capture returns from rising stock prices, short-sellers bet on declines. Hindenburg carved a niche for itself by publishing negative research, often focused on highlighting what it argued to be fraudulent or misleading corporate behavior, while also positioning itself short beforehand. It's unknown how much money the firm brought in overall from its short bets.
Anderson said in his message that the firm's work held some of the most powerful companies accountable for their actions.
"Nearly 100 individuals have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs. We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking," he wrote.
In the next six months, Anderson wrote that he plans to make the firm's tactics public through open-source materials and videos on their investigation process.
Anderson and representatives from Hindenburg didn't immediately respond to BI's request for comment.