Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI premiums for Oura and home builders.

From X

@kevin__mak 3 clicks

Kevin Mak on X

$ABVX Interesting data coming from S&P Markit* (daily short interest based on institutional lending data). Looks like someone established a large position over the past 10 days or so, about 2mm shares or $200M. Given people generally don't like to have single name short exposure over 1-2% of their book (often people size shorts as like ~50 bps), this would be part of a really big book or a really big basket trade. Given the current ABVX-specific situation, it feels weird to be directly betting on the stock falling further from these levels, without any known catalysts around. My best guess is this is part of a "short France" basket trade. But I also can't find any other items of the basket with large changes in short interest to corroborate. Retail Fintwit crowding (correlation with other popular bio names) is likely having an effect as well. Plus rates. Plus biotech degrossing. What I ruled out was a world where this could/would be frontrunning ahead of a possible liquidation (There's a fund with a large ABVX position that took a huge loss on LQDA), but the timing on that is off. In fact pretty much the whole short position was established prior to LQDA crashing. My observation is that the list of items above, plausibly causing weakness in the stock, largely has nothing to do with A) Does the drug work, B) Will the drug sell well. That's what I like about situations like this. ABVX is a large position for us, we've spent a long time recently double/triple checking our fundamental views on the stock and still strongly believe that their key drug, Obefazimod, will be successful even without an acquisition. Hope to have a detailed write-up about that at some point. *I find Markit data to be the most reliable among 3rd party short data, but there are still data anomalies for various reasons. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds a long position in ABVX. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.

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