A dirty little birdy

Scorpion's short report on TMDX

I saw the short report early this morning. I’m reading through it as I write this. I’ve had some private conversations in the past about those planes, not particularly through the angle of ripping off Medicare with exorbitant price gouging of flight costs but as means of tracking flight numbers. Anyone with access to the list of planes transponders squawk codes assigned by the FTC would be able to aggregate flight data during a quarter and gain a substantial degree of edge over other market participants. That’s part of why I trust how that thing trades ahead of quarterly prints. I could be mistaken and that there isn’t a market maker with this level of insight, but it’s pretty hard to know. I’ve never once attempted to track them, but with some legwork it’s probably possible.

Always need to take these short reports with a grain of salt as overly exaggerative because of how reputable short sellers stand to gain from levered instruments, but I could definitely see merit to this end... I’m not sure I believe a lot of what’s in there albeit scorpion generally does pretty well from what I’ve seen. The part where he talks the CEO’s sister intentionally selling bad lungs over the phone to doctors is more ridiculous than I’ve ever said to anyone, and I’ve said some ridiculous stuff. I do not believe the sister of the CEO of TransMedics is selling lungs over the phone that have already been rejected by transplant surgeons as unviable, but there could definitely be some weird stuff going on with those planes...

I also don’t trust that their tech is without any technical merit— that’s completely ridiculous. But there’s usually a knife hidden somewhere, and I would not be surprised if it’s the planes. You should probably verify it, but if you can find uncapped reimbursement limits on the planes billing Medicare… that’s a problem any bull of TransMedics should take seriously as that means the pre-existing foundation is rather unstable.