Nate Anderson on January 6, 2023 in New York. Anderson exposed corporate fraud and Ponzi schemes through his firm, Hindenburg Research.
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Hindenburg Research, a fledgling research and investment firm that has been hit by multiple successful short bets, is closing, its founder Nate Anderson announced Wednesday. And famous.
“As I have shared with family, friends and our team since late last year, I have decided to disband Hindenburg Research Center. The program was concluded after we completed the ideas we were working on. As of now we have just completed and communicated with regulators The last Ponzi scheme case shared was today,” Anderson wrote in a report notes posted on the company’s website.
Anderson founded Hindenburg in 2017, and the firm has published negative research reports on dozens of companies in the years since. Hindenburg’s first high-profile report was released in 2020 and focused on automotive startup Nikola. Part of the report included accusations that Nikola faked the semi-truck’s autonomous capabilities in the film, which the company later admitted. Nikola founder Trevor Milton was later sentenced to four years in prison.
Many of the targets of the Hindenburg Report were small companies. The firm also tracked the companies of major financial figures, including Carl Icahn’s icahn enterprises ltd. and the business empire of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.
The company’s most recent filing was on January 2, covering auto retailers Campervanwhich it calls “years of father-son accounting fraud.” In a statement, Kavanagh called the company’s report “intentionally misleading and inaccurate.” The stock fell more than 11% the day after Hindenburg’s report, but has since recovered.
Hindenburg is both a short seller and a research institution. This means the firm is shorting the company it is researching in order to profit if its stock price falls. As Hindenburg’s reputation grew, some stocks reacted negatively immediately following the report.
It’s unclear how much money Hindenburg made from the short bets.
Hindenburg’s rise comes as the controversial practice of short selling falls out of favor elsewhere. The meme stock craze of 2021 pitted retail investors against hedge funds, leading some professional investors to abandon short selling. Federal officials have also been investigating other short sellers in recent years, including last year when the Justice Department hit Citron’s Andrew Left on securities fraud charges.
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