The feared short-seller Andrew Left, 55, did everything he could to irritate the judge during the proceedings that concluded on June 1. She told him to be quiet twice and ordered some of his remarks struck from the record. Left also showed up late on the day of the verdict. In the end, he had to listen as the jury found him guilty of market manipulation for secretly trading against his own reports. The circus backfired. The defeat was as painful for Left — dubbed the “Bounty Hunter of Wall Street” — as it was for the entire short-selling community, which now faces a stark warning.

He could face up to 25 years in prison, and Left has already said he will appeal. He does not see himself as a cheat, but as a martyr. “I was actually criminally convicted on manipulating Nvidia Facebook and Tesla for telling the truth and making a profit. I am a bit speechless,” he said in a text exchange with journalist Aaron Ross Sorkin.

Calling him an investor hardly does him justice. Left has something of a journalist, an agitator, even a performer about him. His trade — former trade — was investigating companies. When he concluded that a firm was overvalued or involved in wrongdoing, he would publish a report and set a target price at which he expected the stock to fall. He did this through a blog called Citron Research. His conclusions were based on his own analysis and a network of informants. According to a Wall Street Journal study of 111 of his reports, the stocks he targeted fell by an average of 42% over the following year. In other words, he was often right.

Shorting a company you’ve researched is legal. The problem was that Left would announce a price target and then close his position within minutes, long before the stock approached that level. To make matters worse, he coordinated these trades with hedge funds that knew in advance what he was about to do and paid him a share of the profits. Beyond Left himself, the case raises a larger question: what trades must an investor disclose, and how long must they hold a position after making their views public?

He is married with four children and is believed to live in Boca Raton, Florida. At the height of his success, he lived in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. He made millions through his trades. Profiles describe him as charismatic and not particularly accommodating. When it suits him, he frames his work as a moral crusade; when it doesn’t, he admits it is simply a way to make money. After tanking a company’s stock, he once summed it up to The New York Times: “Some guys know this stuff better than me. But I know how to put it in [expletive] tweets.”

His flamboyant style bears little resemblance to the serious, religious boy who grew up in a working-class Jewish family on the outskirts of Detroit. As a child, he moved to Coral Springs, Florida. He led his high school’s Jewish youth group, was on the debate team, and once wanted to become a rabbi. Nothing suggested that in his early twenties, he would end up working at a firm that made cold calls to sell questionable investments. He left that company after nine months — long enough to be included in the sanctions imposed on the firm, which required him to attend an ethics course.

Becoming the enemy

That murky experience led him into short selling at age 24. He flipped the script: instead of hyping stocks to sell high, he bet on the decline of shares inflated by others. In 2001, he founded StockLemon.com, later rebranded as Citron Research in 2007. His masterstroke as a short seller came in 2015. Left published a report targeting the Canadian pharmaceutical company Valeant, which he labeled the “pharmaceutical Enron,” referencing one of the largest accounting scandals in history. The stock plunged as much as 39% in a single day and, within five months, had lost 90% of its value from its peak. The CEO, Michael Pearson, resigned.

Earlier, in 2012, he bet against the Chinese real estate giant Evergrande, accusing it of insolvency and fraudulent accounting. He was right — but a decade too early. In 2016, he was convicted of misconduct, banned from trading for five years, and fined. When Evergrande finally collapsed in 2021, Left responded bitterly: “I am not vindicated, because I’m still banned.”

The GameStop saga in 2021 marked a turning point in his career. The struggling video game retailer was heavily shorted by investors, including Left. But a coordinated group of Reddit users began buying shares en masse, driving up the price to punish hedge funds betting against it. Left publicly dismissed GameStop as absurd. The Reddit community retaliated with an intense campaign of personal harassment. Ten days later, Left released a video announcing that Citron would stop publishing short reports after 20 years. “When we started Citron, it was to be against the establishment. We’ve actually become the establishment,” he said.

In July 2024, both federal prosecutors and the SEC moved against him. The Department of Justice charged him with orchestrating a stock fraud scheme, while the SEC accused him of defrauding his own followers. Left turned himself in in Los Angeles, pleaded not guilty, and was released on bail, with his passport confiscated and his movements restricted to California and Florida. The trial took place nearly two years later and lasted three weeks. He was found guilty.

Left may be the last of a declining breed. Short selling, despite its bad reputation, serves a necessary function: it helps expose inflated accounts and companies that promise more than they deliver. If getting a price forecast wrong can lead to prison, many honest analysts may choose to stay silent. The problem is that, for defending that cause, Left was the worst imaginable martyr.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition