Sahm Adrangi is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Kerrisdale Capital Management ^[0], an investment firm whose sole strategy is activist short selling, or short activism.

Andrangi has been an active member of the firm ever since it was founded in 2009 when he initially launched it with under $1 million assets under management.

The firm manages over $150 million today.

Adrangi started his financial career at Deutsche Bank, where he performed high-yield and leveraged loan financing for companies.

Later on, Adrangi began working with companies that were going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allowed him to see how companies failed and how to properly value companies from the ground up.

Adrangi’s experience with distressed companies eventually led to Longacre Management, a hedge fund focused on distressed debt with a multi-billion AUM.

Adrangi believes that all his prior experience has given him knowledge on how to truly price a company’s fundamentals and how to identify the (often slow) death spiral that failing companies face.

Armed with his extensive industry experience ^[2], Sahm Adrangi founded Kerrisdale Capital with the intent of calling out misunderstood or fraudulent business practices of the company.

The firm accomplishes this by short selling and publicly publishing research to back up its position, meaning he is betting that the company will fail in the near-term and exposes the cause to expedite the process.

Kerrisdale first made a name for itself when it began going after fraudulent Chinese companies, such as China Marine Food Group, China-Biotics, Lihua International, and many others from 2010 to 2011.

Adrangi’s work reached such a high profile that several of the firms he exposed, China Education Alliance and ChinaCast Education Corp, were investigated and fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The scope of the company’s focus was not just limited to Chinese companies – but also a variety of different sectors and domestic companies as well^[3].

One of the firm’s most successful US shorts was Globalstar.

Kerrisdale’s reveal involved renting an entire auditorium in October 2014 to explain to a crowd why the company was fundamentally overvalued.

More recently In 2016, Kerrisdale raised over $100 million to short DISH.

Ever since the company was initially founded ^[1], Adrangi has been dialing in Kerrisdale’s expertise to focus on a few sectors, such as biotech, industrials, and telecommunications.

Adrangi has found that these sectors tend to require the most industry knowledge and regional experience, which has allowed numerous companies to skate by with shaky fundamentals by drowning any attempts of probing with industry jargon and overly high valuations.

In addition to placing short positions, Adrangi has been looking to spread public knowledge by publishing reports detailing the findings of his firm.