hedgefund.wiki — institutional knowledge base

Edwin Dorsey

People · CC-BY-4.0

Edwin Dorsey was a Stanford freshman when he published his first investigative report exposing failures in Care.com's background check system. The report went viral. It sparked congressional inquiries. And it launched a career that would make Dorsey one of the most influential short-selling researchers in finance — all before his 25th birthday. The Bear Cave, Dorsey's Substack newsletter, has grown to 86,000+ subscribers and 118,000 Twitter followers. His reports on corporate misconduct in $1-10 billion public companies have moved stock prices, attracted hedge fund readers, and generated $100,000 in annual recurring revenue within six weeks of launching a paywall. He covers the territory that Hindenburg Research once dominated — deep investigative work exposing fraud, misrepresentation, and ethical failures — but as an independent operator with no fund, no positions, and no institutional backing. That independence is both Dorsey's greatest strength and what keeps him under the radar relative to his influence. Unlike activist short-sellers who profit directly from their calls, Dorsey doesn't short stocks or provide price targets. He publishes research and lets the market decide. It's a purer form of financial journalism — accountability without conflict of interest — and it's attracted a devoted following among professional investors who use his work as a starting point for their own due diligence. Dorsey's intellectual DNA traces to short-selling legends. Marc Cohodes, one of the most successful short-sellers of his generation, has mentored him. Jim Carruthers, founder of the Sophos short-only fund, provided early guidance. Warren Buffett's writings were foundational. But the synthesis is uniquely Dorsey's: qualitative investigative journalism applied to public markets, distributed through internet-native channels, at a scale and speed that traditional research firms can't match. At 28, Dorsey has built something that didn't exist before him: an independent, subscription-funded investigative research platform that institutional investors treat as a primary source. He's not managing money, but he's shaping how money managers think — and in a post-Hindenburg world where activist short-selling is under regulatory scrutiny, the pure-research model may prove more durable than the fund-based approach it replaced.

Details