[ad_1]
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that Marc Cohodes declined to comment. An initial attempt to reach him used an incorrect email address.
Marc Cohodes, having spent decades burnishing a reputation as a successful short seller, loves to crow about his prescient predictions and bets against companies that eventually imploded. And there have certainly been many.
But don’t you dare question him about his mistakes on the long side.
That is a lesson that Edwin Dorsey, founder of investing newsletter the Bear Cave, likely learned during a Tuesday interview with Cohodes on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Minutes into the live interview, Cohodes launched into a profanity-laden rant against Dorsey and other perceived critics, whom he denounced as “f—ing sociopaths” and accused of being “jealous of who I am and what I’ve done.” At times, his language turned threatening as he warned Dorsey that “you and I are going to settle this later.”
The tantrum was apparently triggered by Dorsey’s asking about Cohodes’s cheerleading for stocks that later cratered, including Nikola Corp.
NKLA,
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.
AMC,
and AppHarvest Inc.
APPHQ,
“First off, fact of the matter, I’ve never owned a share of Nikola. So, that is that. Second of all, with AppHarvest, Jeff Ubben is on the board, I respect Jeff Ubben. I bought the stock when they did the SPAC convert. It had a great story, stock flew, story changed, I told people I’m out, story changed, thesis creep is deadly, and I’m out, and that is that. Period.”
He then addressed critics of his AMC call, saying he warned people when he got out of the stock after losing “a million dollars.” He had tweeted in November 2021 that the company could be worth $200 a share.
“Was I wrong [about AMC]? Yeah. Did I lose a million dollars? Yeah. The mistakes I’ve made, and I’ve made plenty, whether it is This Can’t Be Yogurt, or Old Country Buffet, or having Goldman Sachs as my only prime broker. That kind of stuff — those are real mistakes. This other stuff is bullsh—. I lost a million dollars on AMC being long. I p— a million dollars. I’ve donated a million dollars during the last five years to charity, and then some, so I don’t need to listen to bullsh— from you or these psychopaths. Am I clear?”
To be sure, Cohodes has a record as a short seller that spans decades. He originally entered the hedge-fund business in the 1980s, working at Rocker Partners, which was later rechristened Copper River Management.
According to a profile published by Financial News, Cohodes and Copper River were poised to profit from short trades as the financial crisis was breaking out in 2008. However, their counterparty for some of these trades was Lehman Brothers, and its collapse left Cohodes’s fund unable to cash out. The troubles were exacerbated when Goldman Sachs hit the hedge fund with a margin call. Other problems bedeviled the fund, and Cohodes ultimately retreated to his farm, Alder Lane, in Northern California, where he raises chickens, according to Financial News.
He later cultivated a following on Twitter.
Over the past 18 months, his follower count has exploded. He now boasts more than 170,000, largely thanks to his early contention, in the spring of 2022, that FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, were misleading customers and the general public. He later called on investors to short Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, calling them “publicly traded crime scenes.”
When the sudden collapse of those crypto lenders left some retail traders at risk of losing money on a technicality, Cohodes called in lawyers and put pressure on brokerage firms to work with their customers to help them close out profitable positions.
From the archives (April 2023): ‘It says I owe $179,000’: Options traders hit with massive margin calls as winning bets against failing banks are left in limbo for weeks
Over the years, he’s made many successful short calls and bets, including against the German payments company Wirecard, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and fraudulent Belgian software company Lernout & Hauspie, among others.
More recently, some of Cohodes’s long bets have faced criticism from some on social media, including investments in Overstock.com Inc.
OSTK,
and battery maker Enovix Corp.
ENVX,
Cohodes said during Tuesday’s interview that both were examples of his high-risk, high-return investing style, and that he his betting on both because of his faith in their management teams and belief in their underlying technologies.
Both stocks are up to date in 2023, according to FactSet data, with Overstock having gained 26.9% and Enovix 13.2%, although both have seen ups and downs of late.
Also see: Bed Bath & Beyond is back, but ‘much bigger, better,’ Overstock says
“I do shorts and longs. And obviously people want to be critical of my longs, which I take great offense to,” Cohodes said. “I’ve put people in the ground on shorts and obviously the people in the business are jealous, and they can’t come up with anything good, so they criticize my longs.”
He went on to say: “There is a reason I have 19,000 people blocked on Twitter. I don’t need to be torn down by these lowlifes. I’m hard enough on myself.”
Don’t miss: X will remove block feature, Musk says, setting up possible showdown with Apple and Google
Over the course of the interview, Cohodes and Dorsey discussed other topics, including the difficulties facing contemporary short sellers, as well as Cohodes’s negative view on other cryptocurrency firms including Coinbase Global Inc.
COIN,
and Binance.
He also offered would-be short sellers a word of advice: Don’t bet against companies that are deeply entrenched, like Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
or megabanks like JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
Why? Because people like Tesla’s Elon Musk and JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon are “protected.”
“Elon is above the law. Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan are above the law. No matter what laws or rules they break, they pay their fine and move on. Goldman Sachs is above the law. [Citadel CEO] Ken Griffin is above the law.”
Cohodes declined to comment for this story. Dorsey didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
[ad_2]
Source link
