Citron Research's Andrew Left rose to prominence during the original meme stock mania of 2021 when he doggedly maintained a short position in GameStop even as thousands of retail traders banded together to pump the stock's price to the proverbial stratosphere, forcing Left and a number of hedge funds to close their short positions at a steep loss. Fast forward to 2024: Left has now been indicted for improperly profiting off his short recommendations to retail traders.
To wit, a California Grand Jury has now indicted Citron Research's Andrew Left for "engaging in a $20 million multi-year scheme to defraud followers." Critically, Left's prosecution is being spearheaded by the Department of Justice as well as the SEC, as indicated by their coordinated press releases today (here and here). The securities fraud charge alone carries a maximum sentence of 25 years.
Specifically, prosecutors believe that Left used Citron Research's website and its attendant social media accounts "on at least 26 occasions to publicly recommend taking long or short positions in 23 companies ..."
Left's playbook was fairly straightforward: take a speculative long or short position in a stock via cheap short-dated options and then issue recommendations that favored those positions. According to the prosecutors, this playbook was able to move target stocks by over 12 percent on average. Left would buy back the target stock immediately after recommending to his followers to sell, and he would sell the stock immediately after prescribing his followers to buy.
The prosecutors believe that Andrew Left and Citron Research deployed this playbook at least 26 times, affecting the shares of American Airlines (AAL), Beyond Meat (BYND),
Cronos Group (CRON), Meta (FB), General Electric (GE), Luckin Coffee (LK), Namaste Technologies (NXTTF), Novavax (NVAX), NVIDIA (NVDA), India Globalization Capital (IGC), Invitae Corp. (NVTA), Palantir (PLTR), PolarityTE (PTE), Roku (ROKU), Tesla (TSLA), Twitter (TWTR), and XL Fleet (XL).
As recently as June, Andrew Left's Citron Research took another short position in GameStop after bashing Roaring Kitty's pump-inducing moves.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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