McGuire – Financial Treason & Crime

TYLER DURDEN, 19 April 2021

Apparently, firing half a dozen executives including its head of risk management (Lara Warner, also one of the most high-ranking women in the global financial services industry) hasn’t done enough to quiet shareholders’ demands for change atop Credit Suisse, the Swiss banking giant that reported a $4.7 billion loss from the collapse of Archegos Capital Management, with billions of losses likely to follow from the collapse for Greensill.

As CEO Thomas Gottstein clings to his position, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that John Dabbs and Ryan Nelson will immediately step down as co-heads of prime services, the prime-brokerage unit responsible for extending all that credit to Archegos (as a reminder, for an explainer on how Archegos built its $100 billion massively leveraged position. Continue reading “Article: Credit Suisse Prime Brokerage Heads Fired Over Archegos Blowup”

04/26/201802/26/2021

Article: Jim Chanos: Bet Against Dunkin’ Brands, Burger King

Article - Media, Publications

Jim Chanos: Bet Against Dunkin’ Brands, Burger King

F McGuire, 26 April 2018

Investment guru Jim Chanos is betting against Dunkin’ Brands and Burger King’s parent. Chanos told CNBC that he has been shorting fast-food stocks Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc. and Burger King’s parent Restaurant Brands International Inc. “for about a year.”

The founder and president of Kynikos Associates said in a “Squawk Box” interview that he’s shorting Dunkin’ Brands and Burger King’s parent Restaurant Brands International. “We’ve been short these things for about a year,” said Chanos. Chanos said price-to-earnings ratios for restaurant stocks have been going “higher, higher and higher as restaurants themselves have struggled.”

“At some point, that has to come to an end,” he said. “This is part of a broader theme … the franchisers versus the franchisees,” Chanos said. He said he doesn’t like what he calls “this asset-light idea” of these companies not owning their restaurants while “basically clipping the coupons, collecting royalties” from the franchises, CNBC.com reported.
Continue reading “Article: Jim Chanos: Bet Against Dunkin’ Brands, Burger King”

08/20/201305/18/2020

Article: Stripped bare

Article - Media

Stripped bare

Securities Lending Times, 20 August 2013

“Abusive”, “like a form of terrorism” and “funny paper”are three descriptions of naked short selling, given by the Securities and Exchange Committee, a life insurance company CEO, and broker-dealer Jeffrey Wolfson, respectively.

They do not do much to dispel the belief of naked shorting as a practice that is even worse than selling a borrowed security, only to buy it back at a lower price—what we know as covered short selling.

Read full article.

06/21/201305/13/2020

Paper: Naked Short Selling: Is it Information-Based Trading?

Paper

Naked Short Selling: Is it Information-Based Trading?

Harrison Liu, Sean T. McGuire, Edward P. Swanson

SSRN Electronic Journal, 21 June 2013

Citing a widely held belief that naked short selling is not based on company fundamentals, the SEC (2008) has substantially tightened Reg. SHO close-out regulations in an effort to eliminate naked short selling. Contrary to accepted belief, we find that accounting fundamentals are highly significant in explaining naked short sales. Further, naked short sales contain incremental information about future stock prices: Abnormal returns from a long/short trading strategy that buys (sells short) shares with low (high) short interest are more than seven times larger using naked and covered short interest, compared to returns using only covered short interest (15.2 percent vs. 2.1 percent annualized). Our findings show that recent actions by regulators to eliminate naked short sales are likely to impede informed arbitrage and reduce market efficiency.

PDF ( 41 pages): Naked Short Selling: Is it Information-Based Trading?