Sorry if posted before, but this interested me,
my emphasis (Axon/Taser short attack)
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lbzd8a/i_am_rick_smith_the_founder_and_ceo_of_axon/
TeaCupOverdose
What was the
first evidence or thing your noticed or were told that suggested you were under a short attack?
Rick_Smith_Axon
First sign: The pace of negative news articles dramatically increased as we saw the short interest in the stock tick up. However, there is very little transparency around short investors. You could only see the overall short interest once a month (I think it’s once every two weeks now). So, while we could tell you every major share holder (and so can the SEC), no one knows who holds the big short positions, and there is no oversight. It's a big glaring problem, because people can profit through the destruction of a company's value can do so with complete anonymity.
One example: In
July of 2004, the New York Times published a negative piece that drove the price of the stock down dramatically. We received tips that there had been major short selling activity in the days before the article hit — like hundreds of millions of dollars worth. But there was no way to track or verify if that was happening.
It was especially troubling when we learned that the
author of the negative article against us played in a regular card game with a bunch of hedge fund managers. And that same author went on to
write many negative articles over the next year or so—and he even disclosed in a
January 2005 article that he had been receiving internal documents from our company directly from a short seller. In other words, a stock trader had access to inside information and was trafficking that info the the NYT author.
An investigation we commissioned found we had a
paid mole inside the company (my personal assistant, if you can believe that) who was apparently sharing material non-public information with traders shorting the stock.
I flew to New York and shared all the underlying data with the
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. However, without data to establish the trading patterns or identities, there was no investigation.
So there were those
early signals in the form of media scrutiny, which led us down the rabbit hole. Again, we're
not the only ones who face things like this, which is why I wanted to write about it and do this AMA.
