'The Assassin' Fahmi Quadir on How to Survive as a Short-Seller

Summary of 'The Assassin' Fahmi Quadir on How to Survive as a Short-Seller

by Bloomberg

31m•May 22, 2026
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Overview of Odd Lots episode: “The Assassin” Fahmi Quadir on How to Survive as a Short-Seller

This live Odd Lots conversation with Fahmi Quadir, founder and CIO of Safkhet Capital, explores what it takes to run a conviction short-only fund in a market that increasingly rewards momentum, narrative, and passivity. Quadir—nicknamed “the Assassin”—describes the shrinking appetite for short selling, the pressures on short sellers after GameStop and the rise of “financial nihilism,” and why she still sees value in exposing fraud, broken business models, and corporate governance failures. The episode also reveals a major shift: after years as a dedicated short seller, Quadir is launching a long-only activist strategy focused on Korean equities.

Main Takeaways

  • Short selling has become much harder to fund and sustain

    • Institutional allocators have steadily lost interest in short-only or short-biased funds.
    • The post-GameStop environment made concentrated short positions feel riskier to investors, even when the positions had nothing to do with meme stocks.
    • According to Quadir, many short sellers have had to adapt by becoming more factor-driven and tactical, rather than simply holding conviction shorts for long periods.

  • Short sellers still play an important market role

    • Quadir frames short selling as a form of price discovery and, in some cases, market-based corporate governance.
    • She argues that short sellers often do investigative work similar to journalism: following money, people, and accounting irregularities to uncover hidden weaknesses.

  • Today’s market rewards narratives, but that creates opportunities for shorts

    • She describes the current environment as a “golden age of fraud” and a period of “willful blindness,” where investors ignore weak fundamentals if a stock has strong momentum.
    • Short sellers now have to wait for the narrative to break before adding size or pressing positions.

  • The most durable shorts are usually structurally broken businesses

    • Quadir emphasizes businesses with:
      • declining fundamentals,
      • heavy leverage,
      • financial engineering,
      • or management teams that respond to stress with deception rather than transparency.
    • In her view, companies that cannot fix their economics often try to mask deterioration through acquisitions or narrative shifts.

  • Korea is becoming her new focus

    • Quadir says she is going long for the first time ever, launching a strategy centered on Korean shareholder activism.
    • Her interest in Korea stems from:
      • recent market reforms,
      • improving corporate governance,
      • increased focus on shareholder rights,
      • and a changing generational mindset among controlling families and investors.

What Quadir Looks For on the Short Side

Key short thesis inputs

  • People: bad actors often move from one broken business to another.
  • Money: who is funding the business, and what incentives does that create?
  • Narrative dependence: whether management is using storytelling to explain away weak economics.
  • Structural pressure: sectors where underlying trends force companies toward fraud, financial engineering, or aggressive accounting.

Sectors she highlights

  • Consumer-facing businesses

    • She sees consumer stress as an underappreciated weakness.
    • Rising household debt and debt servicing burdens create pressure beneath headline employment and spending figures.
    • She is especially interested in consumer-adjacent businesses with high funding needs and leveraged roll-ups.

  • Healthcare services

    • She sees healthcare as a long-term short theme because of reimbursement pressure, cost-of-care issues, and political populism.

  • Private credit-linked businesses

    • Not a primary macro theme for her, but relevant where private credit intersects with stressed consumers and opaque financing structures.

The Wirecard Example

Quadir uses Wirecard as a case study in how short research works in practice:

  • The public story was accounting fraud, but her team focused on the U.S. business and money flows.
  • They paid attention to the people around the operation, including a key fixer connected to Jan Marsalek.
  • The arrest of that person signaled a psychological collapse within Wirecard.
  • Soon after, the company unravelled and disappeared amid the missing billions scandal.

Her broader point: the key to a successful short is often understanding where the pressure points are and what will actually make insiders panic.

Why Korea Matters to Her New Strategy

Quadir sees Korea as an unusually interesting market because it combines:

  • world-class industrial and chip exposure,
  • a still-emerging-market governance structure,
  • a tradition of powerful family-controlled conglomerates,
  • and a strong new policy push to improve shareholder outcomes.

What’s changing in Korea

  • Shareholder rights have been more clearly embedded in the corporate code.
  • Regulators are pushing companies to improve governance and support domestic equity flows.
  • Companies trading below book value may be publicly named and shamed.
  • Controlling families, or chaebols, are under greater pressure to modernize.

Why she thinks she can add value

  • Her background in fraud and governance analysis can help identify companies with hidden value.
  • She is not focused on Korea’s biggest chip names like Samsung or SK Hynix.
  • Instead, she is looking at firms with weaker governance, less international sophistication, and a higher need to adapt to new market expectations.

Notable Insights

  • “Short sellers are one of the last arbiters of market-based corporate governance.”
  • “The narrative is broken” is, in her view, the most important condition for a short to work well.
  • Korea’s push to reward higher stock prices is, in her framing, a major structural shift: companies now need to care about valuation in a way they historically did not.
  • She argues that some of the most important market opportunities come from places where accounting, politics, and incentive systems intersect.

Bottom Line

This episode presents short selling as both an analytical discipline and a cultural outlier in modern markets. Fahmi Quadir argues that the best shorts today require patience, deep research, and an ability to see through momentum-driven storytelling. At the same time, she makes a notable strategic pivot toward Korea, where governance reform and shareholder activism may offer a new way to apply her skills—this time on the long side.