Trader in France Scores 3rd Victory in Short Selling Contest

GuruFocus.com09-17

Laurent Condon, a professional stock trader in France, has won my annual short-selling contest for a third time. Condon scored a 99.7% gain on his entry from a year ago, Mullen Automotive Inc. (...

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(...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trader-france-scores-3rd-victory-170443085.html\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":"yahoofinance","html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Trader in France Scores 3rd Victory in Short Selling Contest</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nTrader in France Scores 3rd Victory in Short Selling Contest\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2024-09-17 01:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trader-france-scores-3rd-victory-170443085.html><strong>GuruFocus.com</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Laurent Condon, a professional stock trader in France, has won my annual short-selling contest for a third time. \nCondon scored a 99.7% gain on his entry from a year ago, Mullen Automotive Inc. (...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trader-france-scores-3rd-victory-170443085.html\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":".IXIC","symbol_name":"NASDAQ Composite","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trader-france-scores-3rd-victory-170443085.html","article_id":"2468828737","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":["https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/J..NyygysiBsr9Yz6KSK.Q--~B/aD01NTA7dz01NDY7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/us.finance.gurufocus/b10b754667c348d7df2b4c0bba8e0b44"],"rights":null,"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2468828737","pubTimestamp":1726506283,"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"yahoofinance","name":"雅虎金融"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Laurent Condon, a professional stock trader in France, has won my annual short-selling contest for a third time.Condon scored a 99.7% gain on his entry from a year ago, Mullen Automotive Inc. , an electric car maker based in Brea, California. The stock has descended from $45 a share when the contest began to 13 cents a share as of Sept. 13. Short sellers gain when a stock falls.GuruFocus has detected 8 Warning Signs with MULN.I call this contest Short Sellers Don't Have Horns, because I believe that short sellers provide a useful antidote to the hype that surrounds some overvalued stocks.There's no risk in entering the contest, but in real life, short selling is a risky investment technique. In a regular purchase of stock, the maximum loss is 100% and the potential gain is unlimited. 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(NASDAQ:MULN), an electric car maker based in Brea, California. The stock has descended from $45 a share when the contest began to 13 cents a share as of Sept. 13. Short sellers gain when a stock falls. \n\nWarning! GuruFocus has detected 8 Warning Signs with MULN.\n\nI call this contest Short Sellers Don't Have Horns, because I believe that short sellers provide a useful antidote to the hype that surrounds some overvalued stocks. \nThere's no risk in entering the contest, but in real life, short selling is a risky investment technique. In a regular purchase of stock, the maximum loss is 100% and the potential gain is unlimited. It's the reverse with short sales: The maximum gain is 100% and potential losses are unlimited. \nCondon won this contest in 2017-18, again in 2021-22 and yet again in 2023-24. He has also finished second once and third once. \nTo boot, he has twice won honors in my traditional stock picking contest, in which the goal is to pick stocks that go up. \nDanger sign\nOne danger sign that motivated Condon to pick Mullen Automotive as his short is the company's history of doing reverse stock splits often a desperation move. \nIn a reverse stock split, a company shrinks the number of shares so that each share is worth more. The goal often is to meet the minimum share price requirement for a stock exchange. From 2016 through 2023, Mullen did five reverse stock splits. \nWhen I interviewed Condon a year ago, he was leaning toward picking WeWork Inc. (WEWKQ) as his short pick for the contest. Had he chosen it, he would still have won the contest. WeWork (a provider of shared office space) went bankrupt and the stock is now worth zero.\nCondon thinks the market presently is a fertile ground for short selling because he sees a lot of speculation. Many investors, he says, are kind of blind to what they are chasing, which is good for me. \nOne stock (actually an exchange-traded fund) he thinks is a good short is Valkyrie Bitcoin Mining ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI). As its name implies, it invests in companies that do online mining of bitcoin. \nSecond place\nThe man who placed second in the latest contest is a stock analyst I call Sam. He is an analyst at an East Coast investment firm, which hasn't given him permission to talk with the press hence the anonymity. \nSam came in first in the contest in 2022-23. This year he placed second with a 97.16% return on MSP Recovery Inc. (NASDAQ:LIFW). The company tries to ferret out claims that have been paid by health insurers and should have been paid by someone else, such as car insurers or workers' compensation. \nMSP's revenue is small and falling. It was less than $8 million in the past four quarters, down from more than $23 million in 2022. MSP Recovery did a reverse split last year, giving holders one share for each 25 shares they previously owned. \nFor the next contest, Sam says he would short Mullen Automotive, the same stock with which Condon won this year. Mullen's revenue in the past four quarters was $160,000 and it has more than $50 million a year in expenses, Sam says. \nThird place\nThird place goes Harry Feld, a retired chiropractor in Delray Beach, Florida. His short pick a year ago, ShiftPixy Inc. (NASDAQ:PIXY) fell 93.85%. \nShiftPixy offers services such as human-resources consulting, payroll processing and workers compensation administration to small businesses. It's based in Miami, Florida. \nMy main reason for shorting it, Feld wrote in his entry a year ago, is that it has never made any money and it will be doing a 1-to-24 reverse split soon. \nHeld had previously taken second place in this contest in 2109-20. He has also won honors a couple of times in my traditional stock-picking contest. \nYou can play\nWould you like to try your hand at short selling, at least on paper? Enter my 22nd annual Short Sellers Don't Have Horns contest. \nIt's easy. Pick a U.S. stock you think will decline a lot from Sept. 30, 2024 through Sept. 12, 2025. You are not required to sell the stock short with real money, but it's OK if you do. \nPrizes are given for first place only. They all have something to do with the word short. Past prizes have included music by pianist Bobby Short, a strawberry shortcake and a biography of Napoleon (a famous short person). \nTo enter, please submit the following: \n\nYour name\nHome city\nPhone number (including weekend number)\nName and stock symbol of the stock you think will fizzle\nA brief statement of the reason you expect the stock to decline. \n\nEntries may be emailed to jdorfman@dorfmanvalue.com or mailed to John Dorfman, Dorfman Value Investments, Suite 1900, 101 Federal Street, Boston, MA 02110. \nJohn Dorfman is chairman of Dorfman Value Investments in Boston, Massachusetts. His firm or clients may own or trade the stocks discussed here. He can be reached at jdorfman@dorfmanvalue.com.This article first appeared on \nGuruFocus.","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"-1","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.29.1","shortVersion":"4.29.1","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/2468828737"}