When Christian Lamarco decided to start his own short-selling firm, he named it in honor of the spies who gathered intelligence for George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
He had watched a television show about the Culper ring, which secretly tracked the movements of British forces almost 250 years ago, and he couldn't help but see the similarities between his shorting and their spycraft.
Now he's caught up in his own story involving national security, the president of the United States and spectacular allegations of modern espionage.
Six months ago, Culper Research published a report outlining its case against Nvidia, which had become the most valuable company in the world by making the chips that power the global AI economy.
His investigation raised questions about Nvidia's business in China and what he called an "uncomfortably close" relationship between CEO Jensen Huang and a woman named Alice Huang, who was an executive at one of the company's major business partners in Southeast Asia. The 40-page report summarized the firm's short position in a simple thesis.
"This is not a bet against AI," Culper wrote. "We are short Nvidia for one reason: the company has a significant China problem."
At first, nobody paid much attention to the 31-year-old short seller whose research typically focused on companies most people have never heard of. The day his report about one of the most important companies on the planet was published, Jensen Huang touched down in Beijing aboard Air Force One on a state trip with President Trump. The next day, Nvidia's stock hit a record high.
"Sometimes, people care about what you have to say. Sometimes, they don't," Lamarco said in an interview. "I guess in this case, they cared six months later."
Six months later, questions about Alice Huang, her coziness with Jensen Huang and the significance of Nvidia's China problem are no longer confined to a short seller's research.
This week, those questions turned into revelations that Nvidia's CEO was having an extramarital affair with a woman who is now suspected of working for Chinese intelligence services. Culper's report went from being ignored to becoming the rare piece of securities analysis to go viral.
"I've never quite had anything like this," he said.
As his research blew up, so did his phone. He muted notifications from X, where his Nvidia posts have racked up millions of views, and turned down TV interview requests.
Nvidia has lost more than $1 trillion in market value and its stock is down 20% since Culper's report, but it's unclear if the epic corporate fiasco has made Lamarco money. He declined to say how much he's earned from the most prescient call of his career -- or if he's still shorting the company.
Lamarco grew up in upstate New York and discovered the world of investing as a finance major at Grove City College, a small Christian school in Pennsylvania. One day, Lamarco drove to Carnegie Mellon for a stock-picking contest where he would compete with Ivy Leaguers. His goal, he said at the time, was to "prove that Grove City students can compete with students from the best schools in the country." Lamarco and his teammate went long on Nexstar Media Group and won second place -- and a $100 prize.
Since finance recruiters weren't in the habit of visiting Grove City College, Lamarco knew he would have to be creative and aggressive to get their attention. He emailed his own research to hedge funds and got a job at a long-short firm in Chicago, where he worked from 2017 to 2019. Then he moved to Pittsburgh with a few months of savings and struck out on his own.
When his firm needed a name, he remembered "Turn: Washington's Spies," an AMC show that he first watched in a high-school friend's basement. He thought the Culper ring's work monitoring British troops in occupied New York had something in common with his own.
"Similarly," he wrote, "we take an exhaustive, investigative approach to investment research."
Before long, he moved to New York himself and began working out of a Brooklyn apartment while his Shiba Inu begged for treats.
Like other short sellers, the sleuths at Culper say they are out to expose deception, financial irregularities and all the ways companies scam investors -- and, of course, make a profit.
Since its founding, Culper has targeted dozens of public companies, mostly small-cap stocks. But Lamarco and his two analysts have taken on powerful forces before.
Last year, a window and glass manufacturer hired Elon Musk's attorney and sued Lamarco for defamation after he alleged the company had links to the Sinaloa drug cartel.
He also tried to make a $1 million wager with Jimmy Fallon, offering in his report to pay up if the late-night host flew in electric air taxis made by Archer Aviation, a company whose CEO appeared on "The Tonight Show" -- and a company that Culper was betting against. He never heard back.
His report on Nvidia was months in the making. Intrigued by reporting in the New York Times and Bloomberg News last year, Lamarco started digging with his team of two analysts. Then they stopped, setting the research aside because it didn't seem worth their time.
"It's just highly unlikely that you're going to find something that everyone else has missed," he said. "Are we really going to have anything to say about the largest company in the world?"
As it turned out, they would. In March, when federal prosecutors charged Super Micro Computer officials with smuggling Nvidia chips into China in violation of U.S. export controls, Lamarco decided it was time to pick up the investigation again. "Let's dig a little bit deeper," he said.
They used a network of paid experts to interview former Nvidia employees, who speculated about a "special relationship" between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang. They analyzed scrubbed code and Singaporean and Malaysian corporate filings. They even pored over YouTube footage from outside a Taiwanese noodle shop.
By May, it was time to reveal what they found.
After a sleepless night, a bagel and a morning cigarette, he hit publish. In that moment, he was confident in the research. What the market did with that research, though, there was no way of knowing.
"When it's some $500 million pump-and-dump, you can have a sense of what might happen next," he said. "I just have no idea here."
At first, not much happened at all. The stock went down, up, down and up again. Last month, Nvidia was worth more than ever.
This month, as the company fell into crisis, the firm named after a spy ring was gathering intelligence on its next target.
"There's something relatively big," Lamarco said. "But by its very nature, nothing will be as big as this."
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