A little-known 31-year-old trader shorted Nvidia — it’s down around 27% since. Is his bet paying off? Chris Morris Thu, November 12, 2026 at 4:45 PM EST 4 min read NVDA -3.72% Trade NVIDIA on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
As investors digest the resignation of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO and president Jensen Huang following two alleged affairs, including one with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, it's inevitable that some traders are going to brag they saw the problem coming. That may or may not be true. None, however, saw it as early as Christian Lamarco.
Lamarco's Culper Research isn't the best known short-selling and investment research firm, but it was the only company to flag "a significant China problem" at Nvidia as far back as May.
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Culper, in that note, said it was shorting Nvidia — and that could be one of the best calls on Wall Street this year. Since the firm researched the note, Nvidia shares have fallen more than 27% (as of 11:00 a.m. ET on Thursday). That would represent a profit of more than $60 per shorted share.
The 40-page report raised concerns about the size of Nvidia's business in China and flagged an "uncomfortably close relationship" between then-CEO Jensen Huang and Megaspeed executive Alice Huang. (Huang is a common surname and the two are not related.)
Lemarco said he was mocked after issuing the report. Even that was more attention the three-person firm would usually receive.
"Sometimes, people care about what you have to say. Sometimes, they don't," Lamarco told The Wall Street Journal. "I guess in this case, they cared six months later."
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What's unclear is just how much, if anything, Lamarco and Culper Research made off of the decision to short Nvidia. While the chipmaker has lost over $1 trillion in market value since the report was issued, Lamarco has declined to say how much his call has earned the firm. He also has not said whether he is still shorting the stock.
Nvidia wasn't the first company Culper has targeted. Since it was founded in 2019, it has turned its sights on several public companies, generally small-cap ones. It's not afraid to make noise, though. One founder, for instance, hired Elon Musk's attorney to sue for defamation after Culper alleged his company was tied to the Sinaloa drug cartel. The most recent target is Cerebras Systems, an AI hardware and supercomputer company, which labels the company "hot garbage."
The Culper report on Nvidia was many months in the making and had actually been shelved at one point, as the team didn't feel it was worth their time.
But after officials at Super Micro Computer were charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China, they reopened their investigation, speaking with former Nvidia employees, who speculated about the relationship between Nvidia's Huang and Megaspeed's Huang.
"Huang has not only vouched for Megaspeed, but seems to have quite literally walked alongside Megaspeed at every step, while maintaining an uncomfortably close relationship with Megaspeed's Alice Huang, a Chinese national," the report reads. "He was first spotted partying with Alice Huang in June 2024 – the same month the Apex/Alibaba pledge was filed. He then dined with Alice Huang in Taiwan in May 2025 – just weeks after the news of U.S. trade restrictions. … [One] Megaspeed employee characterized their relationship with Jensen as 'very close', corroborating another former Nvidia employee's suggestion to us that many Nvidia employees wondered if there was a special relationship."
Just under six months later, Huang is out and Nvidia has begun its search for a new leader.
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