HitHawk Research

Short-biased activist targeting fraud, abuse & deception in European financial markets.
For personal/ political views follow @gpv100xxx

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

BlackStyx stress-tested two energy producers at lower oil prices, looking for one thing: a business that keeps generating cash when the cycle turns.

One cleared the bar. It covers its base dividend at $40–45 oil, runs on little debt, and keeps buying back its own stock.

It's a defensive pick, and that's the point.

Which one made the cut? It's our newest Investment Idea on Black Styx.

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

The web is awash with investment ideas. Hundreds of analysts, publishers and authors. From niche websites to Seeking Alpha, https://t.co/E9uNELbgFa and research aggregators like AlphaSense or (new) Bullpen.

Paid or free, they flood you with research, recommendations and forecasts. Fundamental analysis, technical analysis, esoteric theories — sometimes hardly any analysis at all. But who is behind these ideas? What are their real interests and entanglements? And where are measurable results?

We take a different approach:
→ Selective ideas, few, but often unconventional
→ Independent research
→ Quality over quantity
→ Transparent, measurable performance

Four investment ideas this month. All in the green.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

We second Viceroy's take.

[Viceroy @viceroyresearch]

Viceroy welcome investigation into short selling practices by the @SECGov. We have received no correspondence in this regard, but we have assisted the #SEC with their investigations which would also trigger B7A exemptions.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

@FugaziResearch The governance issues with all those morons serving on both boards are the worst part of this shitshow. Seeing Citadel engaging in 6m trades per day, however, lets me doubt this is a certain call.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

@VultureCaptRes You must be a long-lost cousin...

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

S&P 500 near record highs, yet more than half its stocks sit below their 200-day average (per Barchart). Sentiment isn't buying the rally either: the Fear & Greed Index reads 29 today, Fear, even near all-time highs.

Fresh capital's telling the same story. SpaceX and Cerebras alone account for roughly 89% of the ~$90B raised by US tech IPOs this year: new money piling into the same trade, not spreading out.

Sound familiar? Index at highs, gains concentrated in a handful of names, everyone chasing one technology story. We've seen this movie before: 1999. Go figure.

And I haven't even touched government debt yet...

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

Is Raiffeisen ($RBI) sitting on €12.6B of cash it can't touch, while disclosing only €735M as restricted?

We fact checked @ResearchGrizzly's 64 page short report ourselves, claim by claim. Verdict: mostly holds up, with real caveats.

Full breakdown is available on our platform.

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

@michaeljburry "3. IPOs need hype & puffery; "we are so awesome it could become dangerous" is hype & puffery"
So this is the fear story again, right? Fear enables you to control people - or regulate in this case...

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

Calendar Week 37:
Beneath the main macro headlines, the financial week saw notable market friction as Shortfinder’s campaign against DeFi Development ended in a sharp, squeeze-driven stop out. Simultaneously, Ragnarok Research launched a rare long activist campaign on TransAct Technologies, which underperformed immediately as persistent selling pressure forced the equity down 4.4% within its first 48 hours... read more on https://t.co/cnO1QHdWJE

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Bessent trying to calm the bond market

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

@JehoshaphatRsch Check your site, it returns a "database error"!

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

@GabeVerzino @StyxCapital @Activ8Insights @BmfReports @SH0RTFINDER @hntrbrkmedia @FugaziResearch The report says different, lad. Zero discretion relies on clean data.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

I had a much more straightforward hack. Using Claude code it accessed env files with the api keys. They instantly have been passed to some 3rd party. From that point credits have need used up in minutes. Recharged and again millions of tokens used. Killing Claud code and any spare file and changing the key helped. But be aware that using Claude code is like publishing all passwords online.

[gpv @gpv100xxx]

@CodfishJohnny 🤣🤣🤣
It must be so comforting for your short-seller clients to know that their legal architect possesses such a deeply refined, sophisticated moral compass.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

@callistores @muddywatersre @Activ8Insights

[gpv @gpv100xxx]

To be frank, in this saga around Callisto, Muddy Waters, $SRAD, 1xBet and Activ8Insights, in my eyes nothing – absolutely nothing – adds up.

Two short sellers independently targeting the same small company on the same day by “coincidence” already raises eyebrows. One making >20% within minutes of publication while the other apparently continuously lost money? I’ve never seen that before.

Muddy Waters was the one who came late to the party. Much of the potential had already been realized by the early bird, Callisto. The stock continued to surge until August and only turned after $SRAD reported and UBS halved its price target.

Only days later, this campaign resurfaced with an even stranger story:

A private individual in Ukraine, “Alex Gramm,” regularly files copyright complaints with Google, often involving gambling websites, but also news/magazine sites and others. It appears to be an isolated operator offering to flag and de-index competing websites.

One complaint was filed on behalf of 1xBet in October 2025. We found no other apparent connection to 1xBet.

The complaint in question is from April 2026 and lists 14 companies, most of them sports-gambling sites in countries such as Russia, China and India. Gramm classified it as a third-party complaint and claimed the listed companies had infringed Muddy Waters’ IP related to the $SRAD report.

Virtually anyone could have paid Gramm to file it.

One of the reported companies was Activ8Insights, which brought the issue to X and linked it to 1xBet. Callisto itself wasn’t on the list. However, the allegedly infringing page at Activ8Insights was reportedly Callisto’s report.

But here comes the obvious question: Why?

A customer of a targeted company supposedly hires a private individual to ask Google to de-index a short report. Even if successful, the page remains accessible. It is just not easy to find on Google. Regular clients visiting this company’s site wouldn’t even notice anything.
Additionally, the success rate of these complaints appears to be around 25%. Three or four of the reported pages were removed from Google.
And all of this has apparently been known since April. Why wasn’t it communicated earlier? Was someone waiting for a stock price pivot first?

When things get this bizarre, I prefer to follow the incentives.
The entities profiting from this drama are not 1xBet or Sportradar. Instead, a few key players appear to be reaping significant financial rewards simply by farming attention and engagement.

What concerns me most, however, is that this narrative comes from respected short sellers, supported by people calling themselves journalists. And others are applauding it without apparently applying the same critical scrutiny they would apply to a company they were investigating or investing in.

These are people whose entire profession is supposed to be about seeing through charades before the mainstream does. Their most valuable asset is critical thinking. Their reputation depends on credibility.

So either I am missing something fundamental – or we are watching people deliberately promote a narrative because it serves their own interests.

If it’s the latter, that’s deeply disappointing.
It would mean that integrity and trustworthiness on the short side of Wall Street are no better than anywhere else in the financial industry.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

👇so true

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

The data highlights a brutal reality:
Public capital chasing the Muddy Waters headline at publication was forced to sit on a grueling ~30% paper loss during the summer squeeze, only to scratch out a net-zero return today.

But this isn’t just a story of bad timing. It exposes a deeper, more systemic problem across the activist short landscape.

When elite research shops operate in complete isolation, destroying their own entry windows and leaving the public completely blind to what is happening beneath the surface, short selling loses its core justification. Activist shorting claims to bring integrity and expose corporate deception. Instead, this case demonstrates how a total lack of structural transparency can turn a campaign into a chaotic, self-serving black box.
5/5

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

What happens if you blindly trade short activist reports?

We back-tested a naïve strategy from Jan 2026 to today (Aug 18). Peak returns hit +23%, currently sitting around +17.5%.
Below are the rules and assumptions we used.

[HitHawk Research @HitHawk_]

One of the deepest weekly analyses of the independent long/short research market

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

Latest edition of our Weekly Styx Update is live: https://t.co/IN2ImxeJlP

Check it out and drop us a message how you like it.

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

War risk insurance for tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz is now running 3%- 10% of hull value. Before the conflict it was around 0.25%. Daily transits are currently down about 95% from pre-war levels.

As insurance and freight markets tend to move first, one should recognize that oil prices only adjust next, while CPI trails far behind. The calm inflation print today is really just a reflection of where things stood a few weeks ago, not where the economy stands atm.

If you want an early read on a company's actual cost exposure, the freight and insurance markets usually get there long before guidance or CPI data do.

[BlackStyx Capital @StyxCapital]

Fresh from Styx:
Gotham City Research just shorted Sumitomo Pharma ($4506) and its parent Sumitomo Chemical ($4005), alleging 50–100% downside.

Two-part campaign. Solid research, but not without analytical blind spots. (1/3)