About two years ago my very elderly mother broke her hip in a minor fall and after recovering, is no longer able to drive herself comfortably and safely. So, it was time to sell her car, a low miles Kia sedan she'd bought used about four years earlier. She only drove it about once a week and only around town, so the car still had low miles. After checking online price guides, calling some car lots, and checking recent asking prices of similar cars - I had a pretty good idea what the car was worth and was about to sell it when a friend mentioned checking Carvana.<p>I did and was quickly given a firm offer from their algorithm which was several thousand dollars higher than the highest amount I'd thought possible. It was actually substantially more than my Mom had paid for the car used four years earlier. I was wary as this seemed too good to be true but proceeded through the automated process, which was simple and straightforward. This culminated with an appointment the following day where a Carvana rep came to our house and looked over the car. I expected at this point they'd suddenly "find things wrong" and low ball the estimated price - however, the car really was in exactly the condition I described (which was excellent) - and the rep gave us a check for the offered amount and left with the car.<p>It was fast, easy and substantially more than the 'market price' range for the car. I just shrugged and chalked it up to Carvana blowing investor money to acquire inventory during the weird post-Covid period when there weren't many decent low-miles used cars on the market. While Carvana <i>might</i> have managed to sell it for what they paid my mom, it wouldn't have been quick to find a buyer at that price and there was certainly no room for them to make a profit. So... I'm not surprised to hear claims that Carvana isn't financially sound. If true, it's unfortunate because buying or selling a used car is inefficient and needlessly painful. I'm pretty sure a well-run company could sustain a viable business in brokering used cars. The typical new car dealer trade-in offers are awful and used car lots are notorious for low-ball offers, so it shouldn't be that hard to do better enough to be attractive.
On one hand, this is a report from a group that has disclosed it is also shorting the company stock and expects to profit if the value falls.<p>On the other hand, their reasoning for the accompany being risky and overpriced sounds pretty strong, if perhaps in way too many un-grouped bullet points.
Is Hindenburg accurate with their report? I feel like some of the past accusations like against Supermicro are not cut and dry, since accounting firms seem to disagree with their view.
I don't know how this is not market manipulation.<p>Has anyone ever been contacted by these companies when they're doing their "research"? They're usually upfront negative about the company, "We believe this company to be a fraud. Con. Disrespectful and evil place.", then they spam every available ex-employee they can scrap from LinkedIn and then the subset that respond are the disgruntled burn the company to the ground kind.<p>I've seen even employees make factually incorrect statements about their employer because they didn't understand or they wanted to rumour spread.