With shorts, you will never know the full story! Management teams make sure of that - but you can often get glimpses! Here are some common red flags that Valiant typically looks for in short candidates:

1. Significant management turnover.

2. Shady or small scale auditors / auditor changes

3. Stocks that are up significantly but have historically underperformed or struggled to grow

4. Lots of related party transactions

5. Been a target of lawsuits

6. Shady reviews online (from employees or customers)

7. Lots of profit but no cash flow

• Tools like CapitalIQ allow you to screen for many of these characteristics! Go take a look. And these are just a few of the red flags you can screen for. There are many more!

• It is the job of the analyst to decide whether to dive deeper or move on. None of these red flags are a thesis by themselves, but you can be sure that if two or three of these flags appear together, something is likely happening behind the scenes! Now go see and if you can figure it out

Here are some examples of short ideas that BIG and Valiant have worked on in the past. To be clear, we want these to be more of a source of inspiration rather than a template. We also note these did not have the same conditions, so you'll likely have to be more concise in your submission.

Examples: [BIG] JYNT SHORT MEMO , [VALIANT] GOWEX SHORT MEMO

Past Finalists examples:

1. Hello Group Inc: Investment Memo, Final Presentation

2. Griffon Corporation: Investment Memo, Final Presentation

3. Vita Coco: Investment Memo, Final Presentation