The Bear Cave #254

New Activist Report, Recent Resignations, and Tweets of the Week

Dec 29, 2024

Welcome to The Bear Cave! Our last premium articles were “Problems at POET Technologies (POET)” and “Our 2024 Hedge Fund Analyst Christmas List” and our next special investigation comes out this Thursday, January 2.

New Activist Report

Anonymous tech blogger “Akram’s Razor” published on SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN — $8.86 billion), an AI-powered speech recognition company. Akram’s Razor raised concerns that the company’s claimed backlog is overstated and highlighted that SoundHound’s marquee customers like Mercedes and Hyundai are publicly choosing competing technology. Akram’s Razor concluded,

“SoundHound was a bespoke voice recognition tech player when AI Voice needed that, but LLM's have introduced tech that is 10000x better for everyone at a fraction of the cost. This is why they are losing big clients and even their diminished music recognition app has experienced a total collapse (-52% Q3) in monetization. They have been totally commoditized.”

Recent Resignations

Notable executive departures disclosed in the past week include:

CFO of Fastenal (NASDAQ: FAST — $41.8 billion) “provided written notice to the company of his resignation, effective on April 16, 2025” after nearly nine years. In July, the company disclosed it would switch auditors from KPMG to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Chief Operating Officer of Arhaus (NASDAQ: ARHS — $1.30 billion) “separated” after just seven months. The home furniture company is down ~25% since its November 2021 IPO.
Two board members of Pagaya Technologies (NASDAQ: PGY — $711 million), Mr. Mircea Ungureanu and Ms. Nicole Torraco, resigned with no notice after four years and one year respectively. The company is down ~80% since its June 2022 SPAC merger and the company’s CFO, Principal Accounting Officer, and a total of now six board members have departed.
A board member of Allegro MicroSystems (NASDAQ: ALGM — $4.10 billion), David J. Aldrich, resigned with no notice after three and a half years. Mr. Aldrich continues to serve on the boards of three other public companies. Three board members have departed from Allegro this year, all with no advance notice. In May 2023, The Bear Cave published on Allegro and wrote,
“Allegro MicroSystems is rife with conflicts and irregularities including numerous executive resignations, two auditor dismissals, and a major supplier that is owned by the company’s largest customer and controlling shareholder.”