How to Solve the Puzzle: On Short Selling
Donald MacKenzie, 5 April 2018
There’s a limit to how much you can learn while sitting at your desk reading the footnotes to balance sheets. Sometimes, a short seller has to become a field worker. Look at the website of Muddy Waters Research, for example, and notice the attention it pays to the physical world: precipitous, hairpin mountain roads down which huge volumes of timber would have to be hauled; satellite images of the possibly crumbling walls of a giant opencast mine; a solitary lorry idling outside what one might have expected to be a busy factory.