The Bear Cave #326

New Activist Reports, Recent Resignations, Is Blue Owl Under SEC Investigation? and Tweets of the Week

May 17, 2026

Welcome to The Bear Cave! Our last premium articles were “Follow The Money” and “Problems at Kinsale Capital Group (KNSL)” and our next special investigation for paid readers comes out this Thursday, May 21.

New Activist Reports

Culper Research published on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA — $5.46 trillion), the designer and manufacturer of microchips and the world’s most valuable company. Culper wrote:

“NVIDIA claims its China business went to ‘zero’ after April 2025 U.S. trade restrictions. We believe that in reality, over 20% of Nvidia’s FY 2026 compute revenues remained driven by China via illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries.”

Culper specifically raised concerns about NVIDIA’s sales to Megaspeed, its largest Southeast Asian chip buyer, which NVIDIA claims is wholly owned and operated outside China. Culper alleged that “Megaspeed has been secretly financed by Alibaba via a series of apparent shell companies” and claims NVIDIA’s real sales to China will now trend towards zero “as Beijing’s late 2025 and early 2026 policies have blocked Nvidia imports in favor of its own domestic alternatives.”

Night Market Research published on POET Technologies (NASDAQ: POET — $2.44 billion), a Toronto-based optical interposer design company. Night Market alleged the company “has been pre-selling vaporware for over a decade” and that many of its claimed partnerships or customer orders lack economic substance. For example, Night Market highlighted a purchase order from Lumilens, “an obscure startup that we believe has no intention of fulfilling it.” Night Market noted that Lumilens has “no patents, no tech, no customers” and recently acquired another venture that Night Market alleges has ties to POET.

Night Market concluded that POET “has a 10+ year history of touting partnerships which have gone nowhere” and said POET “should trade at a discount to cash of $800m (~$5/share), given a decade of broken promises, overstated partnerships, and serial dilution.”

Wolfpack Research published on York Space Systems (NYSE: YSS — $3.07 billion), a U.S. aerospace, defense, and satellite company. Wolfpack alleged that the Pentagon “is replacing York’s primary customer (96% of 2025 revenue) with a program where SpaceX’s Starshield is the currently named—sole-sourced—provider.” Wolfpack predicted the company would miss its “2026 revenue guide by ~30% and face a dilution spiral in 2027 as its backlog withers.” Wolfpack also cited a poor internal culture and a material weakness in revenue recognition as additional problems for the company.

Fugazi Research published on Sidus Space (NASDAQ: SIDU -- $324 million), a space and defense technology company, which Fugazi claimed is of “minimal substance [and] will continue to exist through shareholder dilution.”

White Diamond Research published a report on Microbot Medical (NASDAQ: MBOT — $124 million) and, after interviewing a surgeon who used its endovascular robotic system, concluded that it “will be a commercial failure.”

Recent Resignations

Notable executive departures disclosed in the past week include:

CFO of SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR — $129 million) resigned with immediate effect after just three months. The residential solar company has had five CFOs in the last three years and switched auditors from Deloitte to BDO USA in August 2024.
CFO of CRH plc (NYSE: CRH — $69.0 billion) “stepped down by mutual agreement” with immediate effect after one year. The building material company has had five CFOs in the last five years.
CFO of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: IRWD — $589 million) resigned with one week’s notice after a little over one year. The company has had six CFOs in the last five years and switched auditors from Ernst & Young to KPMG in July 2025.
CFO of Gaotu Techedu (NYSE: GOTU — $446 million) resigned “due to personal reasons, effective May 31, 2026” after seven and a half years. The Chinese online education company, formerly known as GSX Techedu, was previously criticized by several activist short sellers including Muddy Waters Research and Citron Research.
CEO and co-founder of Rent the Runway (NASDAQ: RENT — $127 million), Ms. Jennifer Hyman, “entered into a Separation, Advisor and Release Agreement” after 17 years leading the company. The agreement includes a monthly advisory fee of $62,500, a prior bonus of $1,587,500, accelerated vesting of 103,047 restricted stock units, “subsidized continuation coverage under the company’s medical, dental and/or vision plans,” and “a lifetime subscription to the company’s wardrobe rental service.” The company is down ~99% since its October 2021 IPO.

Data for this section is provided by VerityData from VerityPlatform.com

Is Blue Owl Under SEC Investigation?

On Thursday, May 14, the SEC released its FOIA Logs for April 2026. Included in the SEC’s spreadsheet titled, “April 2026, B7A Exemption” is an April 23 FOIA request from 9fin reporter Maria Heeter for:

“any formal or informal investigative records, subpoenas, correspondence, notes, or internal SEC communications pertaining to Blue Owl Capital Inc., dated from January 1, 2025, to the present.”

On April 30, the SEC denied the request in full, citing the B7A exemption, which is used to withhold records when releasing them would “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” As such, B7A denials are sometimes interpreted as a sign of SEC investigative activity into a particular company and often precede official disclosure of an investigation.

For example, on October 6, 2025, AppLovin fell ~15% after Bloomberg reported the company was under an SEC investigation. However, The Bear Cave detected and highlighted that AppLovin appeared on the SEC B7A list three weeks prior to public reporting of the SEC investigation. See here and here.

B7A disclosures are not always a sign of an undisclosed SEC investigation into the relevant company. Sometimes the SEC will deny a FOIA request with B7A for unrelated reasons, such as an insider trading case involving the stock, or because the company is a third party in a different investigation.

Blue Owl Capital (NYSE: OWL — $14.8 billion) has received criticism for its private credit positions in software companies and its reliance on retail investors to fund various illiquid private credit funds.

News of the Week

“Idea Brunch with Myles Kuah of Value Zoomer” (Sunday’s Idea Brunch)

“The leveraged ETF stuff all started with me reading a paper by Hendrik Bessembinder breaking down the sources of underperformance for leveraged ETFs. One source of underperformance is volatility drag, which is the decay in a leveraged instrument due to volatility (eg 1*1.2/1.2 doesn’t equal 1). While I knew about volatility drag, I (and most people) wasn’t aware of the extent to which financing costs and other unspecified costs cause these single stock ETFs to underperform. Essentially, your traditional leveraged ETFs would leverage an index, and would have access to cheap (50bps above the base rate) financing to build these products. However, the riskier single stock ETFs get charged significantly higher rates, with areas like crypto and meme stocks being charged well upwards of 2000 basis points above the base rate. I haven’t really seen anything else online written about this…”

Notable Paid Stock Promotion Campaigns (StockPromotionTracker.com)

Enhanced Group (NYSE: ENHA — $583 million) has spent ~$1.1 million on paid stock promotion with Outside the Box Capital. The elite sports competition company recently went public via SPAC.
Wrap Technologies (NASDAQ: WRAP — $83 million) has spent $150,000 on a paid stock promotion campaign with Outside the Box Capital.