I’m short selling stocks with a cyber security breach.

I’m a cyber security expert. By profession I’ve been hacking and protecting clients from cyber security threats for a couple decades. I remember my first Defcon in 2004-ish. Sitting next to me on my return flight from Las Vegas to Phoenix, AZ was a business women that asked where my group of friends had come from. I told her Defcon and described the conference. Her response? “You should leverage your computer security knowledge to trade stocks based what unique information you have on the companies”.

This was 15 years ago and I was familiar with trading stocks as a hobby, but I was a broke college student with ZERO financial resources to trade stocks with. I was peddling around a $500 portfolio in the market and not day trading. I’m not even sure how I got that original $500. Now that I’m older and wiser, It has taken me 15 years to realize, holy shit why am I not doing this now? In hacker forums, twitter, and other spots hackers post public information about their exploits. This data is not a secret. These are ultimately the breach notifications that are announced before the PR team of the breached organization has a chance to spin the story.

How do we take advantage of our knowledge and skills? The moment a breach is announced, short the stock. Short the news ASAP. I’m going to post my shorts here and we’ll see how they do. Shorts don’t last forever, so I’m going to be targeting a 14 day time horizon for the short to be in the money. Let’s see what we learn. These days, you can create the short opportunity by building a fancy website describing the breach and the media will be drawn in. You are ultimately creating news.

** Update - Short #1 Choice Hotels, August 16th - $88.20.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CHH?p=CHH&.tsrc=fin-srch-v1

Price on 8/19 = $88.76

** Update - Short #2 First American Financial, August 13th - $57.27.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FAF?p=FAF&.tsrc=fin-srch

Price on 8/19 = $57.86

** Update - Short #3 Activision, August 5th - $45.94

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ATVI?p=ATVI&.tsrc=fin-srch

8/19 Price = $47.96

This game is going terribly!!! There was one day I was in the money on all of these and it was by a ton. If I exited at that point, things would have been incredible.