Investor Advocacy

asensio.com played a seminal role in developing activist short investing and in distributing short-focused investment research via the internet. For nearly two decades, asensio.com has confronted cases of public companies making misrepresentations to investors. Securities regulation was not something that asensio.com sought to become involved with per se, but the need for improved investor protection – and consequently improved regulation – was a natural outgrowth of a broader public dialogue on short-selling. The public advocacy of short theses by asensio.com and its founder Manuel P Asensio came to entail an advocacy of investors’ rights, improved safeguards against stock fraud, and the benefits of short-selling in driving price discovery and market efficiency. Public advocacy of a short thesis means swimming against the tide of the institutional apparatus for investment information (including the press, regulators, and sell-side analysts), which tends to be deferential to issuer companies and their executives. Investor advocacy – and with it, the attempt to make short-selling less controversial – became a necessary part of working with the investment information apparatus. asensio.com’s investment research and investor advocacy reporting together have played a role in major regulatory developments. Below are some examples reporting related to asensio.com’s investor advocacy work.