Citron Research Bought A Lemon

Carson Block and Andrew Left are in many respects cut from the same cloth: Hard-nosed short-sellers ready and eager to turn rumor and innuendo into detailed research that shows that this company or that is a worthless scam run by some Chaucerian frauds in which much money is to be made in the shorting thereof.

And so it was that an unsolicited 89-page report accusing a Chinese coffee chain of accounting issues and other malfeasance crossed Block’s desk and became a tweet alleging the same. This did not sit well with Left, who in addition to having built his own career out of company-destroying tweets has also been known to go long every now and again, for instance, on Luckin Coffee. This fine purveyor of caffeine, Left insisted, was “on fire,” a formal rating he assigned based on his own, non-anonymously sourced research.