I came across an absolutely asinine opinion piece in Bloomberg today by Andrea Felsted titled “Is the Cashmere King Going Down Market?” I do not think it is a coincidence that it came out the day before the Brunello Cucinelli board it set to meet and has scheduled an investor call for 18:00 on Wednesday following the meeting.
I know I am coming off like a broken record on this one however I have detailed here, here and here why I believe this is a coordinated hit piece from short-sellers Morpheus, Pertento and most likely a “balance sheet partner” using the help of “journalists” from the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Business of Fashion. You can read more about how the individuals shorting this have used balance sheet partners in the past in this article “The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers and the Insiders Trying to Expose It” by Michelle Celarier.
As I mentioned last week, I went long Brunello Cucinelli due to what I believe is a weak “report” (Andrea, just because it’s 84 pages doesn’t make it useful) and the market overreacting. Since then Brunello Cucinelli is up around 12% and I’ve explained my thoughts on this in a note to all subscribers for free yesterday. What I believe is happening here is that the short isn’t working and friendly “journalists” to the funds above are trying to put out negative opinion pieces to knock it back down.
For those of you who are unfamiliar this would not be the first time that short sellers (and to be fair funds who have long positions) have partnered with “journalists” to push their positions and you can search for the examples of it. In an October 2024 Bloomberg Article titled “Why Short Sellers Can’t Even Get Along With Each Other” Marc Rubinstein even states “Roddy Boyd an investigative journalist who received funding from short sellers…”
In another example of Andrea having no idea what the fuck she is talking about and this most likely coming from a fund involved, is that she goes on to state in her most recent piece that:
“In some ways, Cucinelli is the perfect short. A fraction of the size of the luxury behemoths, it has always flown slightly under the radar of many investors. But with a market capitalization of about €7 billion ($8 billion) before the short attack, the company is big and liquid enough to make a difference for hungry hedge funds.”
Who has also been using the term “big and liquid” lately (I’ll give you a hint his name starts with P and ends in -rre). Clearly Andrea hasn’t really heard of average volume and if you look at the size of the positions that Pertento and Knitbury took (Morpheus doesn’t look to have had a material enough position to be reported to the Italian regulatory bodies which is why I think there was a balance sheet partner involved here) it was large to the point where there was squeeze potential and almost irresponsible (just my opinion).
Lastly and what kills a lot of Andrea’s credibility on this one is the lack of proofreading in her final piece. For somebody reporting for Bloomberg you’d think this would be tightened up, unless for some reason it was being rushed out 🤷🏻♂️…
To be very clear, I have no problem with shorting companies, as those of you who follow me know, I do it all the time. What I do have an issue with is poorly researched coordinated attacks that are lazy and use “journalists” to push junk. I still believe there is much more to this short attack on Brunello Cucinelli than just a few funds who decided to pick this up out of nowhere. What do I know I’m just an unpaid intern though so who knows!
Lastly, I