Bringing short-selling into public dialogue and making short-focused research available to all investors have been core parts of asensio.com’s mission since 1996 – the New York Times labeled asensio.com’s work “something radical and remarkable” in 1998. This article was published at the birth of the Internet. It is difficult to imagine a time when stock news website did not exist and the brokerage firms were not yet on the Internet. Investors access to new and reports on publicly traded company was restricted to sell-side analyst reports, company publications and most the Dow Jones newswire and the Wall Street Journal. This was the environment in 1996 when asensio.com issued its first report. Eighteen years later, in January 2014, the National Bureau of Economic Research, [“NBER”] published a research paper titled “How Constraining Are Limits To Arbitrage? Evidence From A Recent Financial Innovation”, the study found that the “pioneer is Manuel Asensio of Asensio & Co., which was founded in 1992 and started publishing reports on overvalued companies in 1994” and that “Asensio & Co.’s reports yield the highest returns’ by the study’s measure and during the study’s timeframe.
Founded in 1920 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts the NBER is “the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. Twenty-four Nobel Prize winners in Economics and thirteen past chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER….[t]he more than 1,300 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields….[t]he NBER is governed by a Board of Directors with representatives from the leading U.S. research universities and major national economics organizations.”