The Hindenburg gambit: short-selling and political meddling

Anyone can take two distinct views on Hindenburg Research's campaign. Hindenburg is an equity research outfit that specialises in negative research. It digs dirt against overvalued companies, shorts those stocks, makes its reports public, and thus makes (a lot of) money. This also helps the markets in general because it's good for companies to be valued correctly and bad for them to be overvalued. This was the nature of its report against Adani group stocks in early 2023. Hindenburg specifically targeted the Adani group as part of a political campaign to tar India's biggest business groups and the government, and in the process, it made a lot of money shorting these stocks. Hindenburg is trying to discredit the SEBI investigation by making allegations against the SEBI chairperson. In the process, it also tried to make money again by shorting the