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Are short sellers in their final days?

Short selling has always been a tough way to make a living on Wall Street. Warren Buffett once mused that there were no short sellers on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans.

Those who dare go against the market face the threat of litigation and private investigators. As Buffett noted, their targets are also highly motivated to keep their game going as long as possible.

Even established short sellers such as Enron’s foil Jim Chanos have thrown in the towel. Trying to call out bad behaviour when the stock market is hitting new highs is a little like entering a party and telling everyone to turn down the music. No one wants to hear it. 

Nathan Anderson of Hindenburg Research is the latest to call it quits, announcing on Wednesday that his firm would be disbanding after seven years running.

He appears to be going out on a high note, calling time after he gripped financial markets with a series of high-profile short bets, most famously his probes of Nikola Motors in 2020 and Adani Group, which began in 2023.

Two months ago, Adani was charged by prosecutors in New York over what they said was a long-running bribery scheme. It appeared to vindicate many parts of Hindenburg’s crusade, which roiled Indian financial markets.

Adani has called the allegations “baseless” and said it was seeking all “possible legal recourse”.

For Anderson, the trade has bookended a short career in which his star burnt bright, thanks to the proliferation of dubious businesses taken public in 2020 and 2021 through special purpose acquisition vehicles.

Many of Anderson’s targets are now virtually worthless, though a few like Carvana, his most recent bet, have seen their shares surge.

His withdrawal has created yet more questions about the future of short selling, particularly so-called activist short sellers who publish detailed research on their targets after they have put on positions betting on their decline.

In recent years, the practice has drawn deep scrutiny, partially because of how little money they have left to bet against companies. Researchers such as Hindenburg had turned to other funds to bankroll their trades.

The US Department of Justice subpoenaed many short sellers as part of a dragnet of the practice, but Hindenburg was left untouched by the probe. The dizzying way in which short bets are funded has led to rising internal industry dissent.

“All of us are figuratively speaking looking into the abyss,” one prominent short seller told DD. “All of the short sellers are at each other’s throats on Twitter. I equate it to playing the fiddle while Rome is burning.”

The political backdrop’s also crucial: US president-elect Donald Trump is promising a deregulatory push that may make shorting even harder. He’s also being advised by Elon Musk, whose company Tesla arguably has led to the greatest short selling losses in history.

Fittingly, perhaps, Anderson announced his retirement just days before Trump’s inauguration.

OpenAI on Tuesday announced a new feature coming to ChatGPT, which will turn the chatbot into a reminder app. Called “Tasks,” the feature will let users ask ChatGPT to remind them about their tasks and even create periodic alerts for specific situations.

ChatGPT now lets users create reminders with ‘Tasks’

OpenAI describes the Tasks feature as an “important step toward making it more of a helpful AI companion that can take on tasks on your behalf.”

With this feature, ChatGPT can send you reminders when you need them, whether they are one-time or recurring. With the feature enabled, all you have to do is tell ChatGPT what you want and when, and it will create the task. There will be a dedicated section for managing tasks in the profile menu within ChatGPT. The chatbot will also suggest tasks based on your chats.

As an example, users can ask ChatGPT to remind them that their passport will expire in 6 months. It also works with more complex requests, such as to get a daily weather report every morning or a list of things to do every Friday. ChatGPT will send push notifications via its website or app. Depending on what you tell the app, it will also create a task automatically (if you allow it to).

The new Tasks feature is now being rolled out as a “beta” to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers. It will be available across all platforms via the new “4o with scheduled tasks” model. During the beta, users can set only 10 active tasks at a time. Push notifications will also work through ChatGPT’s macOS app.

“Right now, we’ll use this beta period to understand how people use tasks and refine the feature before making it available to all ChatGPT users,” OpenAI told 9to5Mac.

In December, OpenAI made ChatGPT Search available to everyone for free. The feature essentially turns ChatGPT into a search engine that can find answers on the web in real time. The macOS app was also recently updated to work with Apple Notes and more third-party apps.

The ChatGPT app is available for free on the iOS App Store. The Mac version must be downloaded from the OpenAI’s website.

Year of the Dragon produces a baby rebound, but demographers say it is temporary

China’s population continued to decline last year—though births edged up for the first time in eight years—falling for a third straight year as deaths outpaced births.

China had seen birth numbers plummet since 2017, the year after it ended the one-child policy, despite Beijing’s encouragement of couples to have three children. At the same time, the number of deaths in China had been creeping up as the population ages.

The data for last year produced a brief reversal of the trend. Births rose to 9.54 million from 9.02 million in 2023, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday. That is still a far cry compared with the more than 16 million in 2015, the final year of the one-child policy.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths dropped to 10.93 million last year from 11.10 million in 2023, Friday’s data showed. That brought China’s total population to 1.408 billion last year from 2023’s 1.410 billion.

Some demographers had expected birth numbers to see a small rebound in 2024, most of which fell in the Year of the Dragon, which is seen as an auspicious one for marriage and births in Chinese culture.

The uptick in births isn’t expected to last. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman has in her lifetime—is less than half of the replacement rate of 2.1, meaning that each generation will be less than half the size of the one before it.

Chinese couples who delayed marriages and births during the pandemic rushed to give births in the Year of Dragon, said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in Guangdong. But he said underlying factors, such as a shrinking number of women of childbearing age and young people’s reluctance to start families, remain unchanged. “This year, births will be lower again,” he said.

According to He, the long-term trend is also that deaths will gradually rise each year as the aging of the population speeds up. In 2010, only 13% of the population fell into the 60-and-older age bracket. Now, that age group makes up over one-fifth of the population, or 22% last year, up from 21% in 2023.

In 2022, deaths overtook births for the first time. Before then, the only other year since the founding of the People’s Republic when more people died than were born was 1960, when the country suffered mass starvation as a result of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

“As populations age, their crude death rates tend to increase,” said Joseph Chamie, a former director of the United Nations Population Fund.

China’s aging is happening fast. In the 2020 census, Chinese aged 80 or older were only 2.5% of the population, but based on U.N. estimates, they will be over 5% by the end of this year and 10% in 2050.

In other countries with aging populations, immigration often helps offset low birthrates and keep the population younger. Lower immigration is one reason U.S. deaths are expected to exceed births in 2033, seven years earlier than projected just a year ago.

China, with virtually no immigration, is stuck on a path of population decline, as deaths outpacing births becomes the new reality. The U.N. expects China’s population to drop to 639 million, less than half of what it is now, by the end of the century.

To encourage more births, Beijing has tried measures from cash incentives to longer parental leaves in recent years, part of promoting what it calls “a birth-friendly culture.” But young women are becoming more prone to resist the pressure to marry and have more children. The country’s economic downturn is also making young people hesitant to marry and start a family.

China long prided itself on a rising life expectancy and an active elderly population. Death was something few spoke of, a cultural taboo. But as the population ages, death has become a bigger part of life.

Diseases related to old age, such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer, have become a major concern in China. About 1.5 million Chinese of 60 or older were diagnosed with dementia in 2022, including 1 million with Alzheimer’s, the latest official data showed.

Elderly care is taking a toll on both families and the economy, eroding household savings and cutting into spending on other items. For many Chinese cities, sluggish economic growth and pension coffers heavily in the red are sapping vitality and making providing for the elderly increasingly daunting.

China’s death rate had hovered just above 7 per 1,000 people since 2008, but has inched toward 8 in recent years. It came in at 7.76 in 2024. The birthrate, meanwhile, edged up to 6.77 in 2024 from 6.39 in 2023.

China’s birth and death data, as published annually by the statistics bureau, aren’t absolute numbers but estimates based on survey results of a small number of households. China’s once-a-decade census is a closer representation of the true state of the population.

A wild card in counting Chinese deaths is the pandemic. In late 2022, Beijing lifted all Covid restrictions practically overnight, thrusting China into a public-health emergency as infections rapidly spread.

Two years later, the exact number of Covid deaths remains a mystery. Epidemiologists have estimated that between 1 million and 1.5 million people died from Covid-19 in China. Chinese health authorities have put the death toll far lower, at roughly 84,000.

A team led by Hong Xiao and Joseph Unger, scientists at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, in a 2023 study estimated excess deaths—a measure of deaths above expected levels—among Chinese 30 or older at 1.87 million between December 2022 and January 2023.

The team, which analyzed data based on three universities’ published obituaries on staff and faculty, as well as search-engine data on searches for keywords such as “funeral parlor” and “crematorium,” found that most of the excess deaths were among older individuals.

Xiao said that death surveillance data released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which had been regarded among public-health professionals as comprehensive and representative, hasn’t been published for 2022 and 2023.

The activist firm run by Jeff Smith owns a 7.7% stake in the chip maker that competes with the likes of Broadcom and Qualcomm

Activist investor Starboard Value has built a big stake in chip maker Qorvo QRVO -0.77%decrease; red down pointing triangle and is seeking changes to boost the company’s lagging share price, according to people familiar with the matter.

The details

Starboard has amassed a 7.7% position in the company, the people said. The stake, valued at around half a billion dollars, is expected to be revealed in a securities filing Friday morning, they said.

The details around Starboard’s plans for Qorvo couldn’t be learned.

Qorvo, based in Greensboro, N.C., had a market value of nearly $7 billion as of Thursday.

Its share price has stumbled in recent months. The business has struggled to rein in expenses and has faced stiffer competition from other semiconductor companies including Skyworks Solutions and Broadcom.

Qorvo shares plummeted late last year after the company forecast quarterly revenue and profit below Wall Street estimates.

The context

Qorvo makes so-called radio frequency chips used by customers ranging from smartphone makers to infrastructure and defense companies.

Chief Financial Officer Grant Brown said in late October that Qorvo was taking actions, including factory consolidation, to improve profitability. A shift by consumers toward entry-tier smartphones, especially Android models, was weighing on the business, he said.

Starboard, led by Jeff Smith, has a history with chip companies and a predecessor to Qorvo. More than a decade ago, the firm had a position in TriQuint Semiconductor, where it pushed for changes and nominated board directors. TriQuint later merged with RF Micro Devices in 2014 and the combined entity became known as Qorvo.

Starboard has held investments in a number of other chip companies over the years, including Nvidia, Marvell Technology, ON Semiconductor and Mellanox Technologies, before it was sold to Nvidia in 2019.

Silicon Valley defence start-up Shield AI hits $5bn valuation

Maker of software for autonomous aircraft is raising around $200mn from backers

Artificial intelligence start-up Shield AI will nearly double its valuation to $5bn in a new fundraising round, as investors race to fund defence technology groups producing cutting-edge military systems.

The San Diego-based group, which makes AI-powered software for autonomous aircraft and drones, is raising around $200mn from defence and aerospace companies set to include Palantir, Airbus and L3 Harris, according to people close to the deal. Venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 and Riot Ventures are also expected to participate, they added.

The fundraising will boost Shield’s valuation from the $2.8bn it enjoyed a year ago amid a flood of investor appetite for companies likely to benefit from higher federal spending on national security under Donald Trump’s incoming government.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and geopolitical tensions between the US and China have also heightened Washington’s reliance on tech companies developing advanced AI products that can be used for military purposes.

Shield’s core “Hivemind” software enables drones and aircraft to operate without GPS, communications or a human pilot. Its autonomous technology is being used by a number of rival companies, including legacy defence prime contractors that can incorporate its software into their aircraft.

“Companies invest in competitors when there’s a strong strategic rationale to do so,” said one of the people close to the matter. The investments are a sign of the “serious commitment to use our autonomy backbone in their programmes”, they added.

Shield declined to comment. Palantir, Airbus, L3 Harris, Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 and Riot Ventures did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The fundraising comes as tech groups are seeking to grab a bigger slice of the US government’s $850bn defence budget from traditional prime contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing.

The Financial Times revealed last month that Palantir and Anduril, two of the largest US defence technology companies, are in talks with about a dozen competitors to form a consortium that will jointly pitch for defence contracts. Shield AI is among the companies lined up to be part of the consortium.

Groups including Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril and OpenAI have in some cases integrated systems to leverage their technology in order to more rapidly advance America’s military capabilities.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary pick, on Tuesday emphasised the need to speed up weapons development through competition and innovation.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, he praised Silicon Valley, saying that it “for the first time in generations, has shown a willingness, desire and capability to bring its best technologies to bear at the Pentagon”.

Investors have been quick to back Silicon Valley’s burgeoning defence industry. Palantir’s share price has soared 330 per cent in the past year, valuing it at over $160bn.

The data intelligence group was co-founded by tech investor Peter Thiel, who also provided the initial backing for Anduril, which launched in 2017 and was valued at $14bn last year.