Investments

We are short shares of Eastman Kodak Company (“Kodak”, NYSE: KODK), a 138-year old commercial printing and imaging company whose stock has more than doubled since announcing a blockchain and cryptocurrency licensing partnership.

Fittingly for a long-time provider of motion picture film products, Kodak’s sudden rise resembles something out of the movies. A dying relic of…

Prothena Corp. PLC (NASDAQ:PRTA) is a $2.4bn development-stage biotechnology company whose stock has climbed over 700% since its spin-off from Elan in December 2012. We are certain that its lead asset, NEOD001, will fail its ongoing Phase 2b and Phase 3 trials.

NEOD001 is a monoclonal antibody designed to treat amyloid light chain amyloidosis (AL amyloidosis). AL amyloidosis is a condition caused by light chain proteins misfolding, which then leads to the light chains sticking together and forming amyloid structures. These amyloids are then deposited…

ViaSat considers itself a leader in satellite technology, capable of producing bandwidth economics competitors can’t match. For the sliver of revenue generated from delivering broadband to an airplane, that may be true. For the 70% of EBITDA that comes from delivering broadband to homes and small businesses, it is not. ViaSat provides inferior technology in a hyper-competitive market. The company’s main business is selling satellite-based basic home internet service to U.S. consumers. Unfortunately, its technology is no match for terrestrial internet providers today…

We are short shares of Pulse Biosciences, a ~$400mm medical-device company with 13 employees, zero revenue, and one focus: developing and commercializing a technology it calls “Nano-Pulse Stimulation” (NPS), in which cells are exposed to very strong electrical fields for very brief periods of time in hopes of killing them. Pulse…

We are short shares of Northern Dynasty Minerals, a Canadian company that owns an undeveloped copper and gold resource in Alaska called the Pebble deposit. Discovered decades ago but never mined, the Pebble deposit has inspired intense controversy, as a broad and bipartisan coalition including environmentalists, Alaska Natives, and commercial fishermen fought its…

We are short shares of Straight Path Communications, a disgraced “5G” hype vehicle whose stock price surged last week for an unusual reason: the announcement of a harsh regulatory crackdown. After a pseudonymous short seller in 2015 accused Straight Path of “fraud,” the FCC opened its own investigation into whether the company had violated its legal duty to actually provide service rather than merely hoard spectrum for the sake of speculation…

First Majestic Silver Corp. is, in the words of its founder and CEO, “the purest silver company in the world,” with six operating mines and a handful of development projects, all located in Mexico. Like any miner, First Majestic has seen its market value fluctuate in sympathy with the price of its key commodity; from the peak of the silver market in 2011 to its recent low point, for instance, First Majestic declined 90%. As precious-metal prices…

Today we are publishing our report on DISH Network Corporation, which you will find below. We also created a website, makespectrumgreatagain.com, that has a 2-minute video and additional information explaining what DISH has done with our nation’s spectrum.

In our previous reports on Globalstar and Straight Path, we challenged the market’s complacent belief that spectrum prices can only go up and that wireless carriers have a desperate, boundless need for ever more megahertz. The most influential promoter of this bogus notion – with tens of billions of…

ClubCorp Holdings is a highly levered golf-course roll-up facing three profound challenges: a secularly declining end market, weak unit-level profitability, and no economies of scale. Founded in 1957 as a single country club in Dallas, ClubCorp now bills itself as “The World Leader in Private Clubs®,” with a portfolio of 206 locations (including two in Mexico and one in China). But as ClubCorp has grown, golf has shrunken…

Sage Therapeutics is a pre-commercial pharma firm whose market value stems almost entirely from a single drug – a member of a class of naturally occurring compounds called neurosteroids – in a single indication, a condition called super-refractory status epilepticus (SRSE). SRSE is characterized by repeated or protracted seizures that defy multiple lines of treatment. Thanks to superficially strong results from a small Phase 1/2 trial that lacked…

Zafgen is a biopharmaceutical company on the brink of extinction. From its founding in 2005, Zafgen’s “big idea,” in the words of one piece of early press coverage, was to “fight fat by cutting off its blood supply.” After licensing a drug called beloranib that was originally designed to inhibit angiogenesis (the development of new blood vessels) in order to treat cancer, Zafgen ultimately focused its development efforts on Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disorder in which a specific group of genes is missing or unexpressed, leading to an array of problems, including obesity and hyperphagia (extreme over-eating and food-seeking)…

As we discussed a year ago in our original report on Globalstar, the stock market has a sad history of gullibly buying into grandiose narratives about spectrum value. In Straight Path (NYSE MKT: STRP), the latest and, in some ways, most egregious example of this phenomenon, the market has found an unlikely object for its enthusiasm: a company with only seven employees and $426,000 of annual core revenue headed by a 29-year-old whose…