Month: December 2020

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Article: Should You Invest in the VanEck Vectors Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH)?

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Should You Invest in the VanEck Vectors Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH)?

Zacks Equity Research, 07 December 2020

Launched on 12/20/2011, the VanEck Vectors Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH) is a passively managed exchange traded fund designed to provide a broad exposure to the Healthcare – Pharma segment of the equity market.

Retail and institutional investors increasingly turn to passively managed ETFs because they offer low costs, transparency, flexibility, and tax efficiency; these kind of funds are also excellent vehicles for long term investors. Continue reading “Article: Should You Invest in the VanEck Vectors Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH)?”

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Article: The Vitol Enforcement Action: Part 1 – Market Manipulation Through Corruption

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The Vitol Enforcement Action: Part 1 – Market Manipulation Through Corruption

Thomas Fox, 07 December 2020

Last week the Department of Justice (DOJ) settled a multi-part enforcement action, partly involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), with Vitol Inc. (Vitol), the US subsidiary of Vitol Holding II SA. Vitol agreed to pay a combined $135 million to resolve matters.

Interestingly, also included in the overall settlement was a disgorgement of more than $12.7 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in a related matter and a penalty payment to the CFTC of $16 million related to trading activity. The FCPA component was settled via a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) and Criminal Information (Information). Continue reading “Article: The Vitol Enforcement Action: Part 1 – Market Manipulation Through Corruption”

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Article: A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

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A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

Sheelah Kolhatkar, 07 December 2020

In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas. Other speakers included the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods; and the Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

Byrne’s talk, entitled “Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street,” was a version of one he had given many times before. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a blockchain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne.
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Article: Vitol to pay $95.7 million to settle fraud, market manipulation charges

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Vitol to pay $95.7 million to settle fraud, market manipulation charges

Reuters Staff, 04 December 2020

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Energy and commodities trading firm Vitol Inc has agreed to pay $95.7 million to settle charges of corruption-based fraud and attempted market manipulation, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday.

Houston-based Vitol did not admit or deny the charges, but agreed to pay the civil penalties related to making bribes and offering kickbacks to employees of certain state-owned entities in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico in exchange for “preferential treatment and access to trades,” the regulator said.

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Article: Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

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Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

ACCESSWIRE, 03 December 2020

Berman Tabacco, a national law firm representing investors, is investigating potential violations of the federal securities laws by OrthoPediatrics Corp. (“OrthoPediatrics” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ:KIDS) and its officers and directors. OrthoPediatrics is a medical device company based in Warsaw, Indiana. The Company designs, develops, and commercializes orthopedic implants and instruments for children with orthopedic conditions. On December 2, 2020, Culper Research issued a report asserting that it believed that OrthoPediatrics “overstated revenues.” On this news, the Company’s common shares were trading down by as much as 13% on heavy volume.
Continue reading “Article: Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws”

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Article: Why Nano-X Imaging Stock Continues to Surge

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Why Nano-X Imaging Stock Continues to Surge

Rich Smith, 02 December 2020

Shares of Nano-X Imaging (NASDAQ: NNOX), the Israeli X-ray machine maker with the novel business idea of giving its products away for free (and then taking a cut of the revenue when doctors use the machines to take X-rays), is back in investors’ favor again. Over the past 10 days, shares of Nano-X have surged 79% — including a big 7% jump today as of 2:20 p.m. EST.

Why is Nano-X doing so well today? To learn the answer, you first have to go back in time a couple of months to mid-September, when Citron Research published a report branding Nano-X as “Theranos 2.0” and a company that not only “has never published any data showing their machine’s images compared to images from a standard CT scanner,” but has actually never even showed investors that it has a machine at all.

These and similar accusations from the short-seller devastated Nano-X’s stock over the summer, but on Thursday starting at 11:30 a.m. EST, Nano-X will attempt to refute all of the above by hosting “a live demonstration that will showcase the Nanox digital x-ray source tube and a range of 2D and 3D imaging applications performed by the Nanox.ARC at the 2020 Radiology Society of North America Virtual Annual Meeting.”

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Article: DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

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DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

Rhian Hunt, 02 December 2020

Food delivery IPO DoorDash, rival to Grubhub (NYSE:GRUB) and other restaurant delivery services, attracted its first major analyst rating even before its shares are actually trading on the stock exchange. The news site Benzinga reported yesterday that investment banking, wealth management, and financial analysis firm D.A. Davidson rated the company as a buy and gave its stock a speculative price target of $93 per share.

Davidson analyst Tom White laid out a bull case for DoorDash based on several metrics, including its 2020 U.S. delivery market share of 50%. That is up from a 36% share at the year’s beginning and 17% two years ago. White also points out that the company still has lots of room for growth, providing service to just 6% of America’s population and handling 3% of off-premise restaurant sales (18 million customers and $8 billion in gross order value, respectively). The $93 price target represents a sixfold multiple of DoorDash’s enterprise-value-to-sales (EV/sales) ratio.
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Article: INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

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INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

GLOBE NEWSWIRE, 01 December 2020

On November 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Research (“Muddy Waters”) released a report entitled “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab.” Among other issues, the Muddy Waters report asserted that Multiplan is “in financial decline, and its financial statements were engineered to obscure this existing deterioration” and that the Company “is in the process of losing its largest client, UnitedHealthcare (‘UHC’),” which “has formed a competitor to MPLN that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest.” On this news, Multiplan’s stock price fell $1.72 per share, or 19.7%, to close at $7.01 per share on November 11, 2020.
Continue reading “Article: INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation”

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Article: DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

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DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

Daniel McCarthy, 01 December 2020

A lot of people have a lot of different opinions about DoorDash in light of their pre-IPO S-1 filing. Many reporters and pundits are concerned about profitability in the restaurant meal delivery category as a whole, wondering whether any of these firms could ever sustainably turn a profit. Many others are more optimistic, pointing to some of the (many) customer-related disclosures that DASH scattered throughout its S-1. And of course, all of this uncertainty is only further compounded by COVID, which was and has continued to be a big shot in the arm for everyone in the category, but introduces yet more uncertainty about how the world will look post-pandemic.

Given my own academic research with Elliot Oblander and Kivan Polimis into the industry, which I will hopefully be able to link to over the next couple of months (if you’re interested, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure send it to you as soon as it breaks!), and given the volume of disclosures that DoorDash provided in the S-1, I took a closer look at the company to uncover what its underlying unit economic condition currently looks like, how COVID has impacted it, and what their “normalized” economics may be after stripping out pandemic-driven behavioral changes.
Continue reading “Article: DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions”

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Article: The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short- Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

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The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

Michelle Celarier

Institutional Investor, 30 November 2020

More than a dozen short-sellers interviewed by Institutional Investor in an effort to penetrate this murky terrain say there are numerous players and various permutations of the model that may involve the sharing of ideas and research along with either a cut of the gains on the short trade or a set fee. In fact, some short-sellers believe that almost all of the activists have such backing — even those running small hedge funds themselves.

THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?