Behind the Bear with Jack Patrick of Pelican Way Research

On a hot afternoon not long ago, the person who is probably the youngest activist short seller in the market walked a long stretch of Manhattan on foot. He could have taken a car. He walked instead, block after block in the heat, because the errand was one he wanted to run himself.

The grocery store was the whole point. Patrick, the founder of Pelican Way Research, was deep into a report on a small company that made smart shopping carts and had told investors it was sitting on a stack of orders worth, on paper, hundreds of millions of dollars. The stock had roughly tripled in three months. The company said its carts were deployed in real stores. So Patrick went to one of those stores, a Morton Williams in New York, to ask whether anybody actually used them.

"The in person diligence, when I do it, I'm always a little nervous, just because they're kind of weird questions to ask," he says. "You're asking, like, are these carts any good? I feel like I'm a person at Morton Williams thinking, what does this person want?" The answers came back in the same flat, faintly miserable tone that New York clerks reserve for strangers, store after store. They did not really use the carts. With the help of additional research firms, he checked the company's other claimed locations. Same answer. The orders, he decided, were a press release wearing the costume of a business.

That walk, on foot through the heat to run down a hunch in person, is as good a portrait of Jack Patrick as any photograph. He is twenty years old. He runs an effectively one person shop. And he does the work the slow way, in person and by hand, because for him getting it right is not a strategy so much as a need, the thing that has quietly organized his whole short career.

The accident

Patrick did not set out to become a short seller. He says he became one almost by accident, though the accident is more telling than the word lets on.

At eighteen, Patrick left his home in Connecticut for the University of Arizona, a sun baked campus of more than forty thousand students known as much for its social life as for its lecture halls. It took him almost no time to conclude the place was not for him. "Not my scene," he says. "I don't party." He called his parents and asked to come home. This is the point in the story where most teenagers would exhale, coast through the easy online course, and disappear into a long stretch of nothing. Patrick took the online course. Then he went looking for a company to take apart.

The company found him first. Rumble, the streaming platform, had run up sharply on the back of a deal with Tether, and the move caught his eye for the reason that now organizes everything he does: it did not obviously make sense. A price can run for good reasons or bad ones, and the gap between the two is where he has since built a career. At the time he had no career and no thesis, only a question and an empty calendar. "I got nothing to do right now," he remembers thinking. "Why don't I write about it?"

The instinct to treat a strange chart as an invitation to do a month of homework did not come from nowhere. Patrick grew up inside the markets. His father spent a career as a portfolio manager and still works in finance, and the household invested long only, in the patient buy and hold tradition. Stocks were not an exotic subject in his home. They were closer to a first language, the thing the adults discussed and took seriously at the dinner table. So when a streaming company did something inexplicable, Patrick reached, almost reflexively, for tools he had absorbed by osmosis years before he had any use for them. The remarkable thing is not that a young man noticed Rumble. Plenty of people noticed Rumble. It is that this one sat down, alone, and spent an entire month tearing it apart.

Even that first attempt was no shortcut. "It would not take me a month to do it now," he says, "but I had spent an entire month on it. I actually had gone through most of the hoops I'd go through now to get to that conclusion."

That first report was written for an audience of one. He was not building a brand or chasing a trade. He wanted to know whether he could do the work properly, carrying a half formed plan that a strong writeup might one day earn him a seat at a small fund. It was his father, the lifelong long only investor, who pointed him toward the door he would eventually walk through, mentioning that people published this kind of analysis publicly. Patrick studied the industry, decided to put the report out under the name Pelican Way Research, and a research firm existed where a few weeks earlier there had been a restless college dropout and a chart that bothered him.

What turned a one off into a vocation was a borrowed line. Somewhere in the interviews he was devouring, he heard Carson Block of Muddy Waters describe the short seller's bargain: you can, in effect, get paid to tell people exactly what you think of them. "That sounds really cool," Patrick recalls thinking. "That's what I've been doing my whole life, and I can make money from that. This is amazing." Block, he says, was the first activist short seller on his radar.

There is an irony Patrick is happy to name. For all that the short side now suits him, he did not grow up dreaming of it. Since he was about eleven, his ambition had been to work alongside his family on the long side, picking quality companies and holding them. "I'd really wanted to be the second coming of Ackman at one point," he says. The choice of idol is its own quiet joke. Bill Ackman built his name as a long activist, but he also waged one of the most public short campaigns of the era against Herbalife and made his most contrarian call betting against the market in early 2020. The hero Patrick picked was never purely a bull. Then Patrick discovered the same streak in himself, contrarian by temperament, constitutionally unable to keep his opinions to himself, "even sometimes to my detriment." The patient long only tradition he was raised in had, of all things, produced a bear.

The chip

Ask Patrick where the need to be right comes from and he does not reach for a tidy answer. He reaches for the truth.

"I've always felt some kind of sense of, I'm out of place everywhere I go," he says. "You go somewhere, you're either too normal for the weird kids or too weird for the normal kids. There's always a kind of middle ground." He grew up feeling that everyone around him had a head start, in smarts or in athletics, and he carried what he calls "a massive chip on my shoulder." The way out he settled on was simple and absolute. Be right. Be the best.

"I'm not claiming I'm the best," he says carefully. "But I definitely saw something where I thought I had an opportunity to eventually be the best, and I really hammered in on that." Then, quieter: "I think it comes from a place of not wanting to be inadequate. Ever again. Or not enough."

"It comes from a place of not wanting to be inadequate. Ever again. Or not enough."

Patrick knows he sees the world a little differently from most people, and he talks about it without flinching or making a production of it. He describes himself as socially awkward and is the first to say so. He does not romanticize the wiring as some kind of superpower. "I just think I like it a lot," he says of the work. What matters more to him is that the people around him are steady. When a trade goes sideways, his friends are the ones who text him to take the day off and go hit balls at the range.

For all the intensity, Patrick has a life outside the work. He golfs, constantly, by his own admission badly. "I do a lot of golf," he says, three times, as if the repetition proves the point. The friends and the standing tee times are not a footnote to the discipline. They are part of how he keeps it sustainable.

The regimen

If the chip explains why Patrick works, his calendar explains how.

He wakes at five or five thirty. He runs for half an hour, then heads to a golf simulator in the city until about seven. Coffee, desk by eight. The block from eight to one he describes simply as "as hard diligence as I humanly possibly can do." Lunch, then a stretch he calls building "idea generation infrastructure," which means screeners to run, places to look, and contrarian voices worth following. At five he wraps the market, texts whoever needs texting, and tries to close everything before dinner. Then a hard stop at seven thirty. No work after that. None.

The discipline is not for its own sake. It is a competitive read. "If I'm going to compete with people who are twenty years my senior, who are thirty years my senior, who generally have so much more experience than me," he says, "I have to be at the top of my game physically and mentally." So he tracks his recovery on a Whoop band, treats eight hours of sleep as nonnegotiable, eats clean, and keeps a therapist and a psychiatrist in his corner. If the recovery numbers are bad, he simply pushes a little less hard the next day rather than grinding himself down.

He bristles, gently, at the word regimented. "Regimented implies stern, scripted, and somewhat not fun," he says. "I love my life. I think it's great. So I think disciplined is probably the word I'd use." It is a small correction, and a revealing one. This is a young man who has thought about the connotation of every load bearing word, in his reports and in his life.

The work

The walk to the grocery store was not a one off stunt. It is how Patrick works on nearly everything. A typical investigation starts the way that one did, with a screen and a smell test. Something is up several hundred percent on no obvious merit, or a company is claiming capabilities it has no business claiming. "A lot of times it's just what's too good to be true," he says. He is partial to what Activ8 categorizes as the hype pivot, the company that wakes up one morning reborn as an artificial intelligence story. "If they're claiming that they have capabilities better or equal to Claude," he says, naming the obvious tell, "that's going to be, yeah, okay, buddy. You're probably realistically a wrapper of some extent."

From there it is unglamorous and slow. Crack the 10-K. What do they actually sell. Who are the competitors. What have they announced in their press releases, and does any of it show up in the revenue. Then the part that separates a report from a hot take: the people. Patrick combs LinkedIn for former employees, sends the awkward message asking if they will talk and what their rate is, and gets on the phone. He outsources some of the sourcing, but he insists on being on every call he can. "I like to hear things firsthand," he says. "That always bugs me," he adds of being kept off a call, "I don't like being not on the call."

What he does on those calls is the discipline made audible. He goes in neutral, braced for the witness to tell him the company is wonderful. "You always want to try and disprove your short thesis," he says. "That gets you the best results." It is the opposite of the smash and grab caricature his own generation tends to assume about the trade. He is not hunting for confirmation. He is trying to break his own idea before the market does it for him.

"You always want to try and disprove your short thesis. That gets you the best results."

The editing, he says, is the part that hurts. Every claim gets reviewed for defamation by a second set of eyes. Every link has to be run down, every primary document, every filing pulled from court records, archived so it cannot vanish. "One grain of false info gets out, that's a career ender, in my opinion," he says. "The counsel for the companies you go after will read it. So you've got to be really careful." He keeps clear of the republication trap, the legal hazard of repeating someone else's defamatory claim as your own. The rule he lives by is older and simpler than any doctrine.

The scars

For all the process, Patrick does not pretend the scoreboard has been clean.

Ask him for his best work and his worst, and he names the same report twice. It was a short on a quantum computing company, a notoriously difficult subject. He is proud of how he rendered something complicated into something a generalist could follow. He is also candid that he was wrong on the timing and wrong on the thesis as it played in the near term, and that the position cost him. "I got my face ripped off in my personal account, pretty badly," he says, without drama.

The lesson reshaped how he trades. He had arrived from a long only world that thinks in five year arcs, and he had assumed that being eventually right was the same as being right. The quantum trade disabused him. "People actually trade on this," he says. "I should really try and do it on a year time frame, not a five year time frame." He sizes accordingly now, with the caution of someone who has been burned. A report is a catalyst because information moves, he reasons, so he leans into the moment of publication and then pares back fast, settling into a small, sober position the day after. If a name moves a few points against him, he cuts it. "I'm an adequate trader," he says. "Not great. I'm not terrible." It is a strikingly unromantic self assessment from a person whose entire enterprise runs on conviction.

He is still short Rumble, by the way, the company that started all of this, in a small position he topped up after a recent pump. And he will not, under any circumstances, flip and ride one of his targets higher once the dust settles. "The quality investor in me will not allow me to buy my names off after the deal," he says. Then, drily: "Tragically, I have some sort of moral compass."

The cause

That compass points somewhere larger than the trade. Patrick sees the work as healthy for the market, even protective, and he means it.

When he is right and a stock falls, Patrick does not celebrate. "It does not bring me any joy to see people lose money because of my reports," he says. He would rather investors treat a Pelican Way report as an expensive education. Read the links. Check the claims. Resolve never to buy the next one. He casts himself as part watchdog and part teacher, and the teacher half is sincere. He does not want the people who bought into his targets going on to buy into the next bad company. He would rather they go off and become the next Warren Buffett. "Although," he allows, "I suppose I have too high hopes for humanity."

He is clear eyed about the moment he is operating in. With enforcement thin on the ground, he leans on a phrase he credits to Carson Block, the idea of "market based prosecution," the market doing the policing that regulators are not. He keeps the bar high for what deserves a public report at all. A broken business, a bad roll up, a company overpromising on acquisitions it has no record of pulling off, that is a fundamental short, and he will trade it quietly. Activism is reserved for the cases where, as he puts it, something is wrong with a capital W. "Someone's lying, someone's misrepresenting something." That is the line he will not cross for content.

It also shapes how he reads his own field. Patrick reveres the craftsmen. He has openly borrowed writing and investigative style from Culper Research, Wolfpack, and Hindenburg, and he speaks of Hindenburg's Nathan Anderson with something close to awe. "I would like to say that Nate is the greatest investigator of all time," he says, noting that the landmark work took years, not weeks. Wherever Anderson is now, Patrick hopes "he's sitting on a beach sipping a margarita."

The strongest idea Patrick offers has nothing to do with any rival and everything to do with what a short report is actually for. A report's "win," he argues, only means something if the stock was genuinely tradable when it published, if there was real borrow and real volume and a window in which ordinary investors could act and come out ahead. That, to him, is the whole point. The impact has to be reachable. On the names he respects, he notes, the ability to borrow exists even on retail platforms, there is time between publication and the market's reaction, and a person who acted on the work could make money.

The flip side is where his patience runs thin, and he frames it as a problem of craft rather than a shot at anyone in particular. Run a report on a stock that has already been squeezed dry of borrow, where there is almost nothing left to trade outside the author and a scared retail crowd, and watch it fall, and the scoreboard lies. The drop is real but no one could have acted on it. He would not count that, he says, even if the stock were down fifty percent two weeks later. What he respects is the harder version. "If you publish on a stock, it has another five million to borrow, people that are not just retail trade on it, and it's down two percent the next two weeks," he says, "I count that as a victory, and much more than the first one." For a publication that ranks short sellers by the numbers, it is a humbling thing to hear from a twenty year old, and a genuinely useful one.

The plan

Patrick's near term ambitions are modest and specific. A few more reports on small and micro cap names, the niche where the bigger firms cannot profitably play because their analyst payrolls force them toward bigger swings. As a near solo shop, he has the freedom to chase the smaller, faster ideas. He would love to publish something in Japan, a market he admires. The goal he names for next year is to climb into what the community quietly recognizes as the second tier. He is precise about the hierarchy, and precise about where he sits in it. "I'm not going to pretend I'm some tier one short seller, even tier two," he says. "But I just want to build myself on the trajectory to get there."

"I plan on being an activist short seller in some capacity forever."

The longer arc is a fund. Not now, he knows. No allocator hands capital to a twenty year old. But in ten or fifteen years, "Jack's fund" is the destination, and the people closest to him know it. What he does not see, ever, is a desk at a conventional firm. "I'm not built for the very corporate world," he says. "I plan on being an activist short seller in some capacity forever." Even if he migrates someday toward long side activism, he expects the bone to remain, the one that says, in his words, f off, I am correct, this is how I did it and how I proved it.

There is one more trait that sets Patrick apart, and it is worth stating precisely. He does not invite a lawsuit. He expects one. To his mind a suit is close to a guarantee for anyone whose work actually lands, the predictable reaction of a company that does not like what it reads, and so the task is never to dodge the risk but to be ready to stand behind every line when it comes. That is what the relentless review and sourcing are for. Where most activists he knows treat the grind and the constant low grade risk as the worst part of the job, Patrick treats it as the draw. "I really enjoy the headaches," he says. It is not the suit he savors. It is the work that makes one a possibility, and the discipline of being prepared for it.

Near the end of a long conversation, he is asked what he would tell a young person who wanted to do what he does. The answer arrives fast and unsentimental, the closest thing he has to a creed.

"If you're going to do it, go at it with all your money. Don't half ass it." Then the part that sounds like it was earned the hard way: "You are a big boy now. Just because you're young, people don't cut you breaks. It doesn't happen. Don't expect people to bail you out." Work as hard as is humanly possible. One up the next guy, then one up the guy above him. Baby steps. Do not look too far into the future, because it will mess with your head. Find the corner of the market that genuinely interests you, however niche, because if you become the best in a small enough field the money follows. And above all, do the thing because it makes you happy.

"You shouldn't do this," he says, "if it doesn't make you happy."

It clearly makes Jack Patrick happy. He is twenty, self taught, sleeping eight hours and tracking every one of them, golfing badly at dawn and walking across Manhattan in the heat to find out whether a grocery store really uses the carts. He wanted, more than anything, not to be inadequate again. So far the scoreboard, the one that counts, the one with real borrow behind it, suggests he is not.