How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
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Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#2The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#3The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Yeah this is pretty great. Good work and good result. My only caveat would be unscrupulous people spreading unfounded rumors or uninformed opinions passing as fact which could result in innocent companies suffering from lack or rigor on the did of citizen investigators. At least it appears sixty minutes did son of their own investigation --althouh I imagine they went in with guilt in mind, which worked out in this case, but can result in different outcomes in other cases.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#4The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Investigative journalism? There is definitely an opportunity for a site that allows such reporting.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#5The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Yeah this is pretty great. Good work and good result. My only caveat would be unscrupulous people spreading unfounded rumors or uninformed opinions passing as fact which could result in innocent companies suffering from lack or rigor on the did of citizen investigators. At least it appears sixty minutes did son of their own investigation --althouh I imagine they went in with guilt in mind, which worked out in this ca…
On the one hand, I'd love to believe that people were rational and would actually examine the data before rushing to follow some advice they got on a site like seeking alpha, so that bad actors wouldn't be able to profit by spreading false accusations. Not having to rely on a drawn-out (and sometimes unreliable) legal process would be great.
On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that people are really bad at being suspicious of the often unreliable stuff they read on the internet. For example, measles has made a roaring comeback in the USA, so even when their own children's health is involved, it seems people aren't willing to actually read farther than a couple of emotionally-charged blog posts before making decisions.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#6The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Yeah this is pretty great. Good work and good result. My only caveat would be unscrupulous people spreading unfounded rumors or uninformed opinions passing as fact which could result in innocent companies suffering from lack or rigor on the did of citizen investigators. At least it appears sixty minutes did son of their own investigation --althouh I imagine they went in with guilt in mind, which worked out in this ca…
Wasn't there this russian guy who did this with bio-tech companies? Spread some rumors and used them to make profitable stock trades. I can recall him being hired by some american/foreign hedge fund after ...
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#7This is basically describing a much smaller scale version, with much lower stakes, of what Bill Ackman has been trying to do to Herbalife for the past couple years. He even placed a bet against Carl Icahn (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCZRk1lL90Q), and they've traded "winnings" and "losings" in the hundreds of millions over the past two years.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#8The original article that Zhou published on Seeking Alpha outlining reasons for going short against LL is available here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1513142-illegal-products-cou...
The lab report of the analysis carried out:
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#9The idea of private citizens both being able to investigate companies for wrong doing and earn income for their work appeals to me. No lawsuit, no legal process. After doing some investigations, just some quick transactions on a trading account, and a blog post later.
Investigative journalism? There is definitely an opportunity for a site that allows such reporting.
Who would pay for it? We've already seen that people aren't willing to pay for quality journalism, so we're left with advertisers? Who obviously don't want their own products being investigated.
Perhaps though if somehow you could get companies to pay for investigations into their competitors? Like an anti-advertising model? I presume this would end up a zero-sum game though, and companies would opt to not play at all.
Re: How a 25-Year-Old Investor Spurred Lumber Liquidators’ Plunge
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investigative journalism? There is definitely an opportunity for a site that allows such reporting.
Who would pay for it? We've already seen that people aren't willing to pay for quality journalism, so we're left with advertisers? Who obviously don't want their own products being investigated. Perhaps though if somehow you could get companies to pay for investigations into their competitors? Like an anti-advertising model? I presume this would end up a zero-sum game though, and companies would opt to not play at al…
Or just fund it like Xuhua Zhou did, with short-selling. Maybe some combination of these, banding together with the Consumer's Union and other interest groups.