Laurent Condon, a professional short seller from France, has recently participated in – and won – an international crypto short-selling contest.
Laurent Condon Is This Year’s Crypto Winner
Known as the Short Sellers Don’t Have Horns event, this is not the first time that Condon has been declared a winner. His first win occurred in the 2017-18 year. The following contest saw him taking third place, and he has also shown prominence in several other crypto trading contests.
Short sellers are individuals who bet that specific crypto assets or stocks are going to experience price dips. They borrow other crypto assets or stocks and sell them, and at some point, they are required to buy them back. However, if the prices of whatever assets they bought during the short-selling period go down, they wind up making a profit.
Regarding his status in the contests, Condon joked:
As you may know from my laughable results in… DEFT contests, I have no clue about macroeconomics.
Condon scored a whopping 91 percent on his short sale of Camber Energy (CEI), a separate stock he chose in the contest. This is ultimately what helped him win given how much energy stocks have dropped over the past year. When discussing his decision to choose such an asset, he explained:
It seemed to me that the management was more busy issuing press releases…than running their business.
The next big stock he’s looking to short is MicroStrategy, which up to less than a month ago, was run by Michael Saylor, the former CEO of the firm that has bet big on crypto and made his software company one of the biggest institutional investors in bitcoin out there. Many of these decisions have led the company into massive debt, but he continues to stick his enterprise directly to the digital asset and even went so far as to engage in another major purchase earlier this week.
He said:
Officially, that’s a software company, but it’s a very risky financial instrument, bitcoins on steroids, i.e., bitcoins bought with debts. We are talking multi-billion debt here.
The second-place winner in the contest was David Heilman, a retired attorney from the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. He decided to short Carvana, a prominent company that sells trucks and automobiles online, while third place went to Derek Galbraith in Canada. He earned this position by shorting Beyond Meat, which offers plant-based alternatives to burger patties and similar products.
As president of Lanart Rug, he stated:
Beyond Meat valued at a ridiculous 15 times sales is an easy pick.
No Recession in Our Midst?
He would later describe the firm as a “failing vegetarian” company. He also sought to ease growing recession and economic strife fears by stating the following:
It’s hard to see a bad recession when unemployment is historically low.
