Working paper, SSRN · 2025
Short Theses, Information Acquisition, and Communication by Activist Short Sellers
Mark T. Bradshaw, Janja Brendel, Luc Paugam & Yike Wang. Dissects how activist shorts actually build a case, drawing on interviews with nine short sellers and 938 short reports. Recycled public sources barely move prices (about 2.5 bp over two days). The novel, self-produced evidence is what bites, roughly 19 bp over two days and 48 bp over a month. Presentation matters too: summaries, original images and a negative tone amplify the reaction. The real edge is proprietary evidence, well packaged.
Read the paper ↗Review of Asset Pricing Studies · 2026
Short Selling Around News in International Stock Markets
Arseny Gorbenko. Across 38 markets, shorts' edge is mostly private information rather than faster reading of public releases. They anticipate bad news and trade alongside insiders. The public-news edge only appears in high-disclosure, high-illiquidity markets.
Read the paper ↗Working paper, SSRN (Imperial / CEPR) · 2025
Best Short
Pasquale Della Corte, Robert Kosowski & Nikolaos P. Rapanos. Builds a conviction signal from position-level EU short disclosures. The names funds crowd into on the short side keep underperforming, beyond every known short anomaly, risk factor or lending friction. Funds that move first pick the best shorts, which suggests concentration is information rather than recklessness.
Read the paper ↗Working paper, SSRN (UT Austin) · 2020
Activist Short-Selling and Corporate Opacity
Wuyang Zhao. Activist shorts hunt where the fog is thickest: they target opaque firms that ordinary shorts avoid, and those targets fall roughly three times harder. Informative on average, though the sharpest initial drops are also the ones most prone to reversal, so opacity cuts both ways.
Read the paper ↗Working paper (Columbia / UNC) · 2015
Revealing Shorts: An Examination of Large Short Position Disclosures
Charles M. Jones, Adam V. Reed & William Waller. The paper behind the EU large-position disclosure regime. Once big shorts became public, disclosed names delivered a 5.23% negative 90-day abnormal return with no reversal. Large shorts are well-informed, and disclosure didn't devolve into coordinated bear raids, a direct rebuttal to the manipulation narrative.
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