Just an interesting article, I see a lot of similarities with the way AMBS trades.
Remember, it is believed that IHUB's parent company in London has an office complex with 100s of employees who are under assumed identities who are paid to bash a public company.
Illegal Naked Short Selling Appears to Lie at the Heart of an Extensive Stock Manipulation Scheme
In order to give more insight into what a naked shorting attack might look like, I have put the predictable elements of a typical attack based on my experience in living through a number of them on separate companies.
Shorts like to target emerging biotechnology stocks that are engaged in high risk drug development and are not widely covered by quality research analysts.
The initial and subsequent attacks are almost always triggered by some news event. Obviously, the shorts seek out negative news or an event that creates uncertainty. However, sometimes an attack can be based on a positive news event which the shorts spin to make it appear negative.
Using the ready platform afforded by the internet and social media, a blogger associated with the shorts goes to work with a negative interpretation of an event. These are usually not sophisticated analyses and are usually limited to one or two pages of text which is invariably one-sided and unbalanced. These are meant to provide “intellectual” reasons and cover for the short attack.
The most prominent of these bloggers usually have no backgrounds in biotechnology analysis or expertise in the science. I believe that in many cases, hedge fund employees actually write the articles which are cut and pasted into the comments of these bloggers.
The heart of the naked shorting scheme involves a group of hedge fund traders conspiring to steadily knock out offers for the stock and to trigger stop loss orders (This is explained later in this report). This is called walking the stock down. The power of these conspiracies is striking and in many cases allows the shorts can largely determine the price that they want the stock to trade at.
The stock weakness gives legitimacy to the contrived negative blogs. The idea is to create fear and uncertainty among investors by making all news events appear to be negatives and to fabricate new issues that the shorts hope will demoralize investors.
The first time I came up against this, my thought was that the blogger was someone who was just more cynical about the chances for success and had an opposite point of view from mine. This is understandable and common in research analysis. I wrote a respectful rebuttal to their argument.
I thought that after their rebuttal to my rebuttal, this would end the discussion. We had expressed our opposite points of view, would respectively disagree and move on. This had mainly been my experience in my Wall Street days as an analyst when I disagreed with another analyst. I was wrong.
The situation quickly escalated. In the rebuttal, the blogger accused me of being stupid, deceitful and being paid by the Company to write positive comments.
In this case, over 20 articles were then written in a period of a year. Usually, they were timed to a press release and regardless of the news and without exception each was interpreted as a major negative. A major strategy was to argue that management was lying to investors and manipulating the stock.
The stock would go down on good news, bad news and uncertain news. One of the pillars of stock manipulation is to make good news appear to be bad.
The blogger was indifferent to truth and actually would make up information that was factually incorrect. When made aware that the information was wrong, he/she would ignore it and even repeat it in later blogs.
There are a number of bloggers who participate in these attacks. Many of these bloggers appear to work together and coordinate their negative attacks. It is striking that many of these people have connections to one another. Many of them were trained at a well-known blogging site that was founded by hedge fund people.
Sophisticated use is made of the Internet and social media. Twitter is used to signal that an attack has begun.
Shorts are well connected to mainstream media and are adept at getting them to unwittingly participate in the scheme.
Vicious attacks are launched on writers who might have an opposite but hopefully more well-reasoned and balanced view. The usual line is that they are being paid by management to write positive articles.
Seeking Alpha has become very friendly to articles supporting short selling and is used extensively by the hedge funds. The site actually promotes as one of its favorite authors a person who writes only negative attack article on companies in which he claims that managements are lying and paying authors who have a positive view on the Company. In his disclosure, he states that he shorts stocks, then publishes a negative article on Seeking Alpha and states that he may cover immediately after the article is published. This seems to meet the definition of a pump and dump scheme. He also acknowledges that he is collaborating with other short sellers. I think they contribute the information for most of his articles
Seeking Alpha allows articles to be published by anonymous authors. These articles are often extremely bearish and are almost certainly written by people at hedge funds.
Hedge fund create pseudonyms and publish on a daily basis negative comments on message boards like Yahoo and Ihub.
Law suits appear after articles and allege misconduct on the part of managements and urge investors to participate in a class action lawsuit.
Initially, I attributed these actions to people who were just more cynical than me and honestly came to their bearish views. I am also very cognizant that there is not an insignificant amount of stock manipulation that warrants shorting some stocks. There are some bad actors who pump stocks up and then dump them and this is every bit as egregious as naked shorting attacks. Interestingly, I believe that the hedge funds who short can be enthusiastic participants in these manipulation schemes as well.
Remember, it is believed that IHUB's parent company in London has an office complex with 100s of employees who are under assumed identities who are paid to bash a public company.
Illegal Naked Short Selling Appears to Lie at the Heart of an Extensive Stock Manipulation Scheme
In order to give more insight into what a naked shorting attack might look like, I have put the predictable elements of a typical attack based on my experience in living through a number of them on separate companies.
Shorts like to target emerging biotechnology stocks that are engaged in high risk drug development and are not widely covered by quality research analysts.
The initial and subsequent attacks are almost always triggered by some news event. Obviously, the shorts seek out negative news or an event that creates uncertainty. However, sometimes an attack can be based on a positive news event which the shorts spin to make it appear negative.
Using the ready platform afforded by the internet and social media, a blogger associated with the shorts goes to work with a negative interpretation of an event. These are usually not sophisticated analyses and are usually limited to one or two pages of text which is invariably one-sided and unbalanced. These are meant to provide “intellectual” reasons and cover for the short attack.
The most prominent of these bloggers usually have no backgrounds in biotechnology analysis or expertise in the science. I believe that in many cases, hedge fund employees actually write the articles which are cut and pasted into the comments of these bloggers.
The heart of the naked shorting scheme involves a group of hedge fund traders conspiring to steadily knock out offers for the stock and to trigger stop loss orders (This is explained later in this report). This is called walking the stock down. The power of these conspiracies is striking and in many cases allows the shorts can largely determine the price that they want the stock to trade at.
The stock weakness gives legitimacy to the contrived negative blogs. The idea is to create fear and uncertainty among investors by making all news events appear to be negatives and to fabricate new issues that the shorts hope will demoralize investors.
The first time I came up against this, my thought was that the blogger was someone who was just more cynical about the chances for success and had an opposite point of view from mine. This is understandable and common in research analysis. I wrote a respectful rebuttal to their argument.
I thought that after their rebuttal to my rebuttal, this would end the discussion. We had expressed our opposite points of view, would respectively disagree and move on. This had mainly been my experience in my Wall Street days as an analyst when I disagreed with another analyst. I was wrong.
The situation quickly escalated. In the rebuttal, the blogger accused me of being stupid, deceitful and being paid by the Company to write positive comments.
In this case, over 20 articles were then written in a period of a year. Usually, they were timed to a press release and regardless of the news and without exception each was interpreted as a major negative. A major strategy was to argue that management was lying to investors and manipulating the stock.
The stock would go down on good news, bad news and uncertain news. One of the pillars of stock manipulation is to make good news appear to be bad.
The blogger was indifferent to truth and actually would make up information that was factually incorrect. When made aware that the information was wrong, he/she would ignore it and even repeat it in later blogs.
There are a number of bloggers who participate in these attacks. Many of these bloggers appear to work together and coordinate their negative attacks. It is striking that many of these people have connections to one another. Many of them were trained at a well-known blogging site that was founded by hedge fund people.
Sophisticated use is made of the Internet and social media. Twitter is used to signal that an attack has begun.
Shorts are well connected to mainstream media and are adept at getting them to unwittingly participate in the scheme.
Vicious attacks are launched on writers who might have an opposite but hopefully more well-reasoned and balanced view. The usual line is that they are being paid by management to write positive articles.
Seeking Alpha has become very friendly to articles supporting short selling and is used extensively by the hedge funds. The site actually promotes as one of its favorite authors a person who writes only negative attack article on companies in which he claims that managements are lying and paying authors who have a positive view on the Company. In his disclosure, he states that he shorts stocks, then publishes a negative article on Seeking Alpha and states that he may cover immediately after the article is published. This seems to meet the definition of a pump and dump scheme. He also acknowledges that he is collaborating with other short sellers. I think they contribute the information for most of his articles
Seeking Alpha allows articles to be published by anonymous authors. These articles are often extremely bearish and are almost certainly written by people at hedge funds.
Hedge fund create pseudonyms and publish on a daily basis negative comments on message boards like Yahoo and Ihub.
Law suits appear after articles and allege misconduct on the part of managements and urge investors to participate in a class action lawsuit.
Initially, I attributed these actions to people who were just more cynical than me and honestly came to their bearish views. I am also very cognizant that there is not an insignificant amount of stock manipulation that warrants shorting some stocks. There are some bad actors who pump stocks up and then dump them and this is every bit as egregious as naked shorting attacks. Interestingly, I believe that the hedge funds who short can be enthusiastic participants in these manipulation schemes as well.
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