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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

This one is interesting because it deals with a young short seller, Chris Drose, that caused a lot of share price decline in a stock I once held, likewise by writing an article for SeekingAlpha.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/27/business/drug...

This is the other stock he did that to, but his article was retracted... of course, only after the stock tanked huge, and continued to tank more afterwards. He must have made a fortune.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3189718-bearish-sa-article-que...

I am amazed by how effective that is, and how he was able to get away with that.

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Investors that investigate companies, identify hidden problems and report on them to the public help enable more accurate price discovery. This wouldn't happen at all if they couldn't trade against it.

For instance, I recall a story where a hedge fund sent PIs to determine that a factory reported running was actually closed down. They can't just trade against that info - it also has to be made public for them to realize gains. I can't imagine how you'd consider activity like this "getting away with it", when the alternative is companies performing unscrupulous acts in secret.

I wasn't criticizing the act of short selling itself. I was criticizing the concept of an individual writing what amounts to a hit piece that was later retracted, and yet profiting off it despite the fact.

Or, in the first case, alleging that a company led to the death of an individual, when later the charge of murder was dropped.

It piqued my interest that in both cases, the meat of his allegations are at least highly ambiguous.

As someone whose job is not nearly as difficult as working with opioid addicts, it would be difficult to condemn such people without damning evidence.

That a person having respiratory issues might not be thought of as requiring hospitalization to me seems like something that could happen without negligence on the part of a rehab facility.

And the idea that rehab facilities are inherently motivated by greed when compared to cheaper outpatient programs based around prescriptions seems to infer malice when the obvious conclusion is that some people really believe that approach is superior. This claim is the type of thing that a competitor might believe but nobody else should.

> That a person having respiratory issues might not be thought of as requiring hospitalization to me seems like something that could happen without negligence on the part of a rehab facility.

That a person having respiratory issues might not be thought of as requiring his oxygen tank refilled strikes me as pretty clearly passing the "reasonable person" test for negligence, on the grounds that if I - with no first aid training to draw on - happened upon someone in such a strait, that would be among the first things I thought to check, once it was evident the person's airway was patent. It seems like an obvious enough concern, after all.

On the other hand, I do carry glucose tablets in my satchel against the possibility of happening on another person with diabetes in severe need of a blood sugar boost, so perhaps I am simply not in all respects a reasonable person.

Just because a murder charge was dropped, doesn't mean that a murder didn't happen. The justice system doesn't convict 100% of murderers.

This is illustrated in the quote

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

They charged the company with murder, which is a first for the legal system. That concept barely makes sense. Who at the company was at fault, and why? The company itself is a legal fiction.

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