The Bear Cave #338

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

Aug 09, 2026

Welcome to The Bear Cave! Our last premium articles for paid readers were “When AI Eats the Moat” and “Problems at Tenable (TENB).” Our next special investigation comes out Thursday, August 20.

New Activist Reports

Gotham City Research published on Sumitomo Chemical (TSE: 4005 — ¥841 billion) and its listed subsidiary Sumitomo Pharma (TSE: 4506 — ¥580 billion). “We believe this report will be regarded as the best and most impactful work we’ve done in East Asia,” Gotham wrote. The key claim: Sumi Pharma “manipulates receivables” to fuel profits, which Gotham believes hides how levered the companies have become. The upshot, according to Gotham, is that “Sumi Pharma’s FY2025 financial statements are misstated by 116-165 billion” and “financial statements will be restated and the Company will face an investigation.”

J Capital Research released a report on Weibo Corporation (NASDAQ: WB; HKEX: 9898) — saying it “looks like it may be acting as banker to a troubled controlling parent,” the Sina Corporation. J Cap writes: “SINA appears to have led Weibo into detrimental investment decisions where returns have been poor and could now embroil Weibo in a huge new liability.”

A Value Investors Club author, Bismarck, wrote up Bending Spoons (NASDAQ: BSP — $28.3 billion), the new, publicly-traded roll-up of software companies you might have thought were already dead, like AOL and Vimeo. The argument:

“Investors are capitalizing acquisition-driven growth at a premium multiple even though the underlying portfolio appears flat to declining organically, reported organic growth is flattered by a non-standard definition, margins are already unusually high, many assets face AI disruption risk, and rapid dealmaking alongside material control weaknesses raises the risk that earnings quality and acquisition economics are far weaker than the headline numbers suggest.”

Recent Resignations or Apparent Departures

Notable executive departures disclosed in the past week include:

SVP, Chief Accounting Officer and interim Chief Financial Officer of Baxter International (NYSE: BAX — $14.3 billion) will resign effective September 15, 2026 after roughly 18 months in the role “to join another company,” which turns out to be rival Cardinal Health, where she’ll serve as Chief Accounting Officer beginning in November.
Head of AI Infrastructure at XPeng (NYSE: XPEV — $11.7 billion) left after just two years to join OpenAI as a member of its technical staff, which marks the latest engineering defection from a public company to the AI labs.
CFO of York Space Systems (NYSE: YSS — $1.5 billion) is leaving the company right after its earnings next week. The company was the subject of a short report from Wolfpack Research earlier this year.
President of McDonald’s USA (NYSE: MCD — $195 billion) is resigning with one day of notice. McDonald’s also removed the Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer from the leadership page of its website in an apparent undisclosed departure. The Vice President of Operations, the Vice President, Global Product, and the Senior Director, Head of Global Intelligence all appear to have left in undisclosed departures this year. This flag is via Canary Data.
President and Chief Executive Officer of Dave & Buster’s Entertainment (NASDAQ: PLAY — $357 million) retired effective August 3, 2026 after roughly 13 months in the role “to spend more time with his family in India.” He was the arcade-restaurant chain’s fourth CEO since 2024. The CFO steps up to replace him.
Chief Executive Officer of Flutter Entertainment (NYSE: FLUT - $16 billion) is stepping down at the end of September. The Bear Cave has written extensively about its main competitor, DraftKings, and the threat it faces from prediction markets.

Departures courtesy of Canary Data, one of the best platforms for investment research.

News of the Week

“SEC Establishes Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit in Enforcement Division” (SEC)

“The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced it is establishing a new specialized unit within the Division of Enforcement to provide the dedicated expertise, focus, and capacity to pursue accounting and financial reporting fraud cases as well as general misconduct in the accounting and auditing areas. The Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit will work in close collaboration with staff across all relevant SEC divisions and offices to ensure its approach to enforcing federal securities laws is consistent with the Commission’s policy goals.”