At this year’s Thorn London conference, hedge funds considered short bets on location-tracking apps, US real estate investment trusts and Swedish medical technology stocks. Meanwhile, Lombardi Capital founder Igor Kulika, who started his career at U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s hedge fund, has long admired the German brake maker. Gotham City Research and General Industrial Partners announced a short position in Iron Mountain, a US REIT whose primary business is paper storage. Iron Mountain, which has a market value of about $26 billion, has shifted its focus to its data center division over the past four years, a move Gotham City said posed “significant credit risk.” Daniel Yu, CEO of Gotham City Research and co-founder of London-based hedge fund General Industrial Partners, and Cyrus de Weck, co-founder of General Industrial Partners, who announced the idea at this year’s Thorn London event on Wednesday, described the core business as “melting ice.” “So what did they do with it? They bought data centers with other people’s money,” Yu said. IRM 6M Mountain Iron Mountain. Yu said the company has spent $6 billion on data center investments and its stock is outperforming the Magnificent Seven, but is “very aggressive” on EBITDA margins. EBITDA refers to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Overall, the company faces a downturn of almost 80%, Yu and de Weck said. “This is like a hurray for a dying company,” Yu said. Iron Mountain did not respond. Meanwhile, Stockholm-based multi-strategy hedge fund Blumer & Partners has a negative bet on BoneSupport, a Swedish medical technology company specializing in synthetic bone filler solutions, but the man who manages BoneSupport’s fundamental long/short stock portfolio suggested that BoneSupport has been using selective research to “pick and choose” its treatment results since it was announced. Among other things, he criticized management disclosure, saying, “We need to ask ourselves why companies would do this. Who benefits from this? 2B4-FF 6M Mountain Bonesupport AG. The Stockholm-listed medical technology name also wants to expand into open trauma care and spine care, which are larger markets than its current division, but Teern said he believed the move would ultimately fail. Run Scheerd said concerns about a collapse in cash flow and sales were refuted by the company’s position. He said the company had already addressed Blumer’s statements, much of which “stemmed from clear misunderstandings” and that CERAMENT, the bone-supported synthetic bone graft substitute, had already been addressed. G’ has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which said it analyzed the data itself and confirmed the statistical significance of the primary results. Elsewhere, Life360, a location-sharing app with a market capitalization of about $6 billion, is “monetizing the anxiety” of caring parents of school-age children, said Priya, founder and chief investment officer of Catamaran Capital, who said of the company’s expansion plans into open trauma and spinal care. Kodeswaran Catamaran, which operates a market-neutral long/short equity strategy aimed at generating alpha from change and catalysts arising from earnings dispersion, shorts the company, which listed in Australia in 2019 and dual-listed on Nasdaq in 2024. Life360’s stock price has been “inflated,” but the company’s stock price could now fall by 40%. In his investment pitch, Kodiswaran criticized the company’s subscription approach, which relies heavily on U.S.-based paying members while also facing competition from similar location-tracking capabilities from Google and Apple, which are free. “The risks of the business model are actually increasing,” Lombardi Capital said in a statement. Igor Krika, founder of Lombardi, has invested in Knorr-Bremse.Igor Krika, founder of Lombardi, said the Munich-headquartered group has a best-in-class rail business in the RVS sector and that Knorr-Bremse is “the undisputed leader in passenger rail braking systems.” Half of all trains worldwide are equipped with Knorr brakes, and the stock could double from current levels, he said, noting the company will be a direct beneficiary of Germany’s impending infrastructure spending.Krika started his career as an analyst at Bessent Capital in 2000 before moving to the quantitative hedge fund giant. He then returned to Scott Bessent at Soros Fund Management in 2014 to manage KBXA-FF 6M Mountain Knorr-Bremse’s $2 billion European equity portfolio.
