The scathing report on the Adani Group may well have made Hindenburg Research and its founder Nathan Anderson unpopular among a large section of market players, especially within the Ahmedabad-based conglomerate, but both -- the firm and its founder – are gaining a lot of popularity on social media.
Data from the social media analytics platform Social Blade shows that the follower count of Hindenburg Research jumped by nearly 2.5 lakh in the last one month with the total count now pegged at nearly 4.5 lakh.
Interestingly, the research firm joined Twitter in July 2017 but there was not much of traction in terms of following as the official handle of the research firm that takes short positions in firms before releasing a report typically gained an insignificant number of followers every month.
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The trend registered a huge spike in January with nearly 2 lakh new followers – it had gained a paltry 193 new followers in December 2022.
The activity level also shot up post the release of the report on the Adani Group – which led to the group’s market capitalisation eroding by over $100 billion in a matter of days – as the Twitter handle posted extracts from its report quite frequently – often more than a few times every day.
While there were many tweets – all related to its report on Adani Group -- posted on January 25, the last tweet prior to those were posted on January 9 that was followed by tweets on December 7, 2022.
Similarly, the follower count of Anderson whose Twitter handle is @ClarityToast, also jumped by more than 17,000 in the last one month, with the total follower count pegged at nearly 44,000.
While Anderson calls his Twitter handle a “personal account”, all his tweets are related to reports of Hindenburg. Further, the jump in his follower count has mirrored the trend of Hindenburg's handle with January seeing the count at nearly 7,000 even as December saw his follower count move up by only 430.
Post the release of the report on Adani Group, Anderson has mostly tweeted/retweeted media reports that support the findings of Hindenburg.
Meanwhile, going by the publicly-available data on its site, the research firm that claims to unearth “man-made disasters floating around in the market” has released reports on more than 15 companies till date starting in 2017.
While Indian business conglomerate Adani Group is its latest target, the firm was most active in the year 2020 even as there was a global lockdown on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The research firm earlier released scathing reports on companies like Nikola, WINS Finance, China Metal Resources Utilization, SC Worx, Predictive Technology Group, SmileDirectClub, and Yangtze River Port & Logistics among others.
More importantly, the research firm always takes a short position – designed to profit from a fall in the stock price -- in the company before releasing a report.
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