Investments

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…

We were impressed with the quality of Luxoft’s people. More than 70% of Luxoft employees are senior specialists with over 7 years of experience, and over 80% are educated to Master’s or Ph.D. level. At Luxoft we’ve found teams of experts ready to grill you with tough questions. And that’s what you need on complex projects.

– Daniel Marovitz, Former COO at DB’s global banking unit…

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…

Allied Minds (LSE:ALM) is a London-listed, US-based firm that operates like a specialized venture capitalist, investing in early-stage technologies created by academic researchers and attempting to bring them to market. Trading at 7x book value and 3x net asset value – using the company’s own valuations of its subsidiaries, which we believe are baselessly optimistic – Allied Minds enjoys tremendous benefit of the doubt on the part of…

Bavarian Nordic A/S (OMX: BAVA, OTC: BVNRY) is a $1.3B Danish vaccine-maker whose stock price has recently surged (up 63% YTD) thanks to excitement over its putative prostate-cancer treatment, Prostvac-VF, a therapeutic vaccine currently undergoing a Phase III clinical trial. Bavarian Nordic touts its earlier Phase II study of Prostvac as showing the “most pronounced survival to date in prostate cancer,” with an 8.5-month…

We are long shares of Webster Financial (WBS). Our full 44-page report is available here.

We also issued a letter to the company this morning encouraging management and the board of directors to explore strategic options to highlight the value of HSA Bank, including a potential spin-off of the asset.

Additionally, we will host in-person meetings on March 5th and 6th in New York to discuss our views with interested investors. Please contact myself and Theresa Callahan at tcallahan@kerrisdalecap.com if you would be interested in attending these meetings…

We are short shares of Globalstar, Inc. (GSAT). We believe its shares are worth zero.

Our slide presentation is available here and our report is available here.

Sahm Adrangi, Chief Investment Officer of Kerrisdale Capital, will make a live presentation on the company at the AXA Event & Production Center at 787 7th Ave. between 51st/52nd Streets (*please note venue location change*) in New York City today at 11:30am ET. Please arrive 15 minutes in advance to sign in.

A webcast of the presentation can also be accessed here.

We have also set up a website at www.factsaboutglobalstar.com with our report and slides.

Globalstar’s proposed Terrestrial Low Power Service (“TLPS”) will never be commercially viable and its spectrum is worthless under any other use case. The company is heavily indebted, with a more than 20x debt-to-ebitda ratio, and is likely to violate financial covenants in the near future.