Andrew Left fraud trial closes, plus 2 new shorts: INV & ALT
Weekly Wrap Up: Sunday, May 31, 2026
Happy Sunday. It was a week where the short selling world spent as much time in the courtroom and on the macro desk as it did digging into individual names. Closing arguments wrapped in the criminal trial of Citron Research founder Andrew Left, with prosecutors telling jurors the evidence that he traded against his own published short calls is overwhelming, while his defense insisted the government cherry-picked a handful of tweets. Meanwhile, a fresh crowd of short sellers is circling something bigger than any single stock in BlackRock's giant bond ETFs, and Adani's shares finished clawing back the market value that Hindenburg erased back in 2023, a reminder that these campaigns can swing both ways over time. On the research front, Morpheus Research went after Innventure with a blistering report on its liquid cooling crown jewel, and the stock obliged, sliding nearly 17% on the week. Shortfinder also flagged Altimmune in its systematic rankings, though that one shrugged off the attention and drifted higher. Two very different reactions, one busy week. Let's dig in.
- Morpheus Research targeted Innventure (INV) alleging that its largest portfolio company fabricated a marquee 300MW data center deal. Stock closed the week down 16.9%.
- Shortfinder flagged Altimmune (ALT) in its systematic short rankings. Stock closed the week up 2.4%.
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New Activist Reports
Morpheus Research Short Report on Innventure
| Metric | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Close (Day Before) | $6.41 | — |
| Low (Report Date) | $5.63 | -12.2% |
| Close (Report Date) | $5.87 | -8.4% |
| Close (End of Week) | $5.33 | -16.9% |
Stock Price Impact
Innventure entered the week at $6.41. When Morpheus published on May 28, the stock dropped fast, hitting an intraday low of $5.63, down 12.2% from the prior close. It pared some of that to finish the session at $5.87, an 8.4% decline. Rather than recovering, the selling continued through the rest of the week, with INV closing at $5.33 on Friday, down 16.9% from where it started. That steady multi-day slide is notable. Many short reports trigger a sharp one-day drop followed by a bounce, but Innventure kept falling, a sign the market was digesting the allegations seriously rather than dismissing them. With so much of the company's value tied to a single portfolio bet, investors had little cushion.
About The Company
Innventure is a US-based technology commercialization company that licenses promising but undeveloped technologies from large corporations, then builds and operates standalone companies around them through a process it calls DownSelect. Its leadership, including CEO Bill Haskell, chairman Mike Otworth, and CSO John Scott, first ran this incubator playbook in the 1990s with XL Vision and XL TechGroup. The company's value is concentrated in three portfolio companies: AeroFlexx, Accelsius, and Refinity. By Morpheus's math, roughly 75% or more of Innventure's approximately $538 million valuation rests on Accelsius alone, a liquid cooling startup built on intellectual property licensed from Nokia in which Innventure holds a 43.2% stake. In 2025, the technology segment that houses Accelsius reported just $1.55 million in revenue.
Key Points from the Report
- According to Morpheus, Accelsius's flagship win, a November 2025 agreement to deploy its cooling technology across a 300MW AI data center campus in Ontario for a company called DarkNX, is a complete fabrication. A build of that scale would rank among the largest in Canada, yet the report says it found zero evidence the project exists.
- The report characterizes DarkNX as a shell company, alleging it was incorporated in November 2024 out of a single-family home, lists roughly nine LinkedIn employees with no visible data center experience, and gives a Mississauga "data center" address that leads to a trucking terminal.
- Morpheus alleges DarkNX's marketing is fabricated, pointing to website claims of 998GW of capacity (about three-quarters of total US generation) and saying Dell, Supermicro, and Schneider Electric all denied being partners; two former Accelsius employees reportedly said "there's no data center."
- The report alleges insider enrichment, claiming executives paid themselves roughly $31.6 million across 2024 and 2025 against $3.2 million in revenue and $371 million in losses, diluting shareholders by 41% in about 18 months.
Read the Full Report Summary →
Shortfinder Short Report on Altimmune
| Metric | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Close (Day Before) | $2.98 | — |
| Low (Report Date) | $2.98 | 0.0% |
| Close (Report Date) | $3.07 | +3.0% |
| Close (End of Week) | $3.05 | +2.4% |
About the Publisher
Shortfinder isn't a traditional activist short seller. It's a system.
Rather than building narrative cases against individual companies, Shortfinder ingests SEC filings daily and runs machine learning models that score small and micro cap equities on the likelihood and magnitude of price declines across 1, 5, and 20 day horizons. The output is a ranked, systematically updated universe of short candidates built from the filing record itself.
Coverage Areas
Dilution Risk · Financial Health · Insider Behavior · Ownership Networks · Enforcement History
Activ8 Newswire
- Prosecutors deliver closing arguments in the Andrew Left fraud trial — Federal prosecutors urged a Los Angeles jury to convict Citron Research founder Andrew Left of securities fraud, calling the evidence that he traded against his own published short calls "overwhelming," while his defense argued the government cherry-picked tweets. Source: Bloomberg
- Short sellers are circling BlackRock's big bond ETFs — A growing group of short sellers is lining up to bet against BlackRock's flagship investment-grade (LQD) and high-yield (HYG) bond funds, a relatively rare move into the multi-trillion-dollar ETF arena. Source: Bloomberg
- Adani stocks erase their Hindenburg losses — Adani Group shares extended a rally that recouped the market value wiped out by Hindenburg Research's 2023 fraud and stock manipulation allegations, effectively closing the book on one of the most consequential short campaigns of the decade. Source: Bloomberg
