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

What It Covers

Fahmi Quadir, founder of Safkhat Capital and known as "the assassin," explains how short selling has evolved since GameStop, why consumer debt and healthcare are her current short targets, and why she is launching her first-ever long fund focused on Korean corporate governance reform.

Key Questions Answered

• •Short Seller Survival: The GameStop meme stock event of 2021 effectively destroyed institutional appetite for dedicated short funds — even managers who never touched those stocks lost allocator support. To survive, short sellers have shifted from long-conviction thesis-building toward momentum-driven, earnings-catalyst timing, sizing into positions only after the narrative has already broken and momentum confirms the thesis.
• •Consumer Stress Indicators: Household debt servicing costs have reached 11% of income in the US, with significantly higher burdens for households carrying student loans. Quadir targets consumer-adjacent businesses with high funding needs, particularly leveraged roll-ups in consumer discretionary and healthcare services, where structural deterioration is masked by financial engineering and price-gouging dependent on loose regulation.
• •Fraud Detection Framework: Companies facing structural decline consistently turn to financial engineering and accounting manipulation to mask deteriorating fundamentals. The most reliable short signal combines sector-level structural pressure with behavioral analysis of management — specifically tracking what external pressures, beyond stock price, are causing executives to show psychological stress, as demonstrated in the Wirecard case.
• •AI Valuation Risk: Quadir draws a parallel between today's AI investment cycle and 1920s utility holding companies — layered financing structures where cash flows recycled between opaque entities manufactured artificial demand. She identifies a potential OpenAI IPO as a key informational catalyst that could force market repricing of AI-driven revenue assumptions currently embedded across the sector.
• •Korea Long Thesis: South Korea enshrined shareholder fiduciary duties into corporate law less than one year ago, and the KOSPI regulator now publicly names companies trading below book value. Third-generation chaebol owners, more globally oriented than predecessors, are incentivized to unwind depressed valuations previously engineered to minimize inheritance tax, creating a structural re-rating opportunity for overlooked mid-tier conglomerates.