LONDON -- Fahmi Quadir had the kind of career any short seller would envy: a record of bringing down companies like the fintech giant Wirecard, a fearsome nickname -- " the assassin" -- and two Netflix documentaries highlighting her work uncovering corporate malfeasance.
Now, she's walking away from it all. After a decade spent driving stocks lower, Quadir has decided she wants to do the opposite -- help push them up.
For her next act, Quadir is setting her sights on South Korea, hunting for hidden gems in the world's hottest stock market. From her London base, she is up by 2 a.m. most days, calling locals and sifting through data to find companies ripe for a shake up. This summer, she'll make her debut as an activist investor there.
It is quite the shift for the 35-year-old American, who for years stood as one of the last of her kind on Wall Street: a hedge-fund manager who bet exclusively against stocks. Her fund, Safkhet Capital, had no hedges or long positions -- just a handful of bets against companies she believed were predatory businesses or frauds.
It was a high-risk strategy that initially paid off as Quadir landed punches against her targets. But eventually, the bull market hit back harder. With the S&P 500 up nearly threefold since Quadir launched Safkhet in 2018, she spent the past few years trying to claw back losses on wagers that didn't go her way.
"I kind of felt like a hamster running on a wheel," Quadir said. "Because no matter what I did, no matter how good the ideas were, it was just too difficult to get out of the hole."
Reluctant to stray from the original purpose she set out with, Quadir decided to shutter her fund last year, joining other famed short sellers like Jim Chanos and Hindenburg Research's Nate Anderson who have retreated from the space.
Yet she was still eager to put the skills she had amassed to use, and had been eyeing Korea as a market worth exploring for years. Despite the country's enormous chip-stock gains, more than two-thirds of the Kospi index still trades below book value.
She realized she could flip the script: The same forensic analysis skills she had once used as a short seller could be used to send stocks higher by jostling for changes from within.
It won't be easy. Companies rarely welcome activists, and Korea has historically been especially inhospitable -- in part because of the sprawling, family-controlled conglomerates called chaebols that still dominate the market today. Even activist heavyweight Elliott Investment Management was bruised there in 2015, when it failed to block a merger inside the vast Samsung group. (The resulting legal battle is still playing out.)
Quadir herself is no stranger to hard-fought battles. Her successful bet against Valeant Pharmaceuticals, the poster child for drug-price gouging during the 2016 election, landed her a starring role on Netflix's "Dirty Money" docuseries. Her next big win as a short seller, against Wirecard -- the German payments processor that collapsed amid allegations of fraud -- netted her fund tens of millions of dollars. Many believe a female short seller in HBO's "Industry" is loosely based on her.
Quadir describes this moment as the "age of grift." But she recognizes that if prices aren't moving her way, "then I need to find something else to do."
"My whole career has been about finding businesses that are failing because of bad governance," she said. "But what if there are businesses where you have governance issues that can be repaired?"
Big wins, then mounting challenges
Quadir never expected to be a hedge-fund manager. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, she grew up on Long Island loving math, and always anticipated a career in academia or as a scientist.
But a gap year between Harvey Mudd College and plans for a Ph.D. program led to a detour into consulting, where she was asked to build a predictive model for a pharmaceutical company to forecast drug shortages. The company used the model to raise prices instead, Quadir said.
"I was always cynical about corporations," she said. "But here it was just kind of thrown in my face."
That experience motivated Quadir to switch up her career plan, and she soon landed a job as an analyst at a healthcare-focused hedge fund in New York. In 2015, she pitched a short against Valeant, a then highflying pharma company. Quadir thought Valeant's business model -- borrowing to acquire other pharma companies and then raising the prices of their drugs -- wasn't sustainable.
The idea was a hit: Valeant's stock began cratering later that year after presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called attention to drug-price gouging. When fellow short seller Andrew Left accused Valeant of creating fraudulent invoices, the stock sank further. Quadir walked away a winner.
She started fundraising for Safkhet in 2017. It was a slog. Short-only funds like hers had been falling out of vogue, with investors instead preferring long-short funds or the fast-growing multi-managers that run sprawling portfolios and tightly manage risk.
Quadir scraped together $6 million and plowed a chunk of it into a wager against Wirecard. She tracked down whistleblowers and poked around the fintech firm's American headquarters. A little over two years later, it collapsed. When Safkhet's assets peaked at $85 million, roughly 25% was positioned against the company.
That bet -- and others like it -- brought rewarding moments, as Quadir heard from people affected by firms she shorted: patients who couldn't afford medications, or students at a for-profit education giant she accused of wasting taxpayer dollars on bad programs.
But they also came at a cost: In early 2020 -- just a week after Quadir met with the FBI to hand over evidence against Wirecard -- a masked assailant with brass knuckles punched her in the head as she walked her poodle in Manhattan. The attacker stole nothing, she said.
"She's had the living stuffing beaten out of her personally and professionally, and she's still around," said Marc Cohodes, a short seller who mentored Quadir and nicknamed her the assassin. "She just keeps coming back for more."
Since then, challenges have mounted for short sellers across the industry. The GameStop frenzy put hedge funds in retail investors' crosshairs. Meanwhile, U.S. regulators began probing short sellers' trading tactics, culminating in a securities-fraud conviction for Left last month. Investors weren't eager to keep plowing money into funds with concentrated short bets that could blow up or attract regulatory scrutiny.
And all the while, stocks kept climbing -- even those Quadir considered surefire shorts.
As time went on, she found it increasingly difficult to dig out of that hole.
'I don't want to be pigeonholed'
Quadir plans to hedge her new venture, Safkhet Sentinel, with a broad basket of positions, an effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
In the months ahead, she expects to build stakes in a handful of Korean companies. She's hiring a team on the ground and is planning to establish a Seoul office and keep visiting frequently. She's called London her home base since 2023, when she moved across the pond to do short-selling advisory work on the side for the anchor investor in her new fund. She has since met her partner here.
As Quadir tells it, there couldn't be a better time for her new venture. The government has launched a "corporate value-up program" to address the so-called Korean Discount -- rolling out measures like tax breaks and a stock index designed to steer investment toward companies that reward shareholders with dividends and other measures.
Her initial targets: small-to-midcap companies that she believes can benefit from her expertise. She'll push for changes like ensuring that boards and auditors are independent or urging companies to buy back and retire shares.
"I'm not coming with a fixed menu," Quadir said. Above all, she's eager to avoid being perceived as a hostile actor.
"I don't want to just be known as the girl who brings down Valeant or Wirecard," she said. "I don't want to be pigeonholed as the assassin."
Write to Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 17, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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