How Open-Heart Surgery Led to Launching My First Newsletter

A funny thing happened on the way to starting a new venture in activist short selling... Something else came along. It was an out-of-the-blue e-mail from Enrique Abeyta, a source from my days as a journalist, that simply said, "Catch up?" This was about a month into my new gig, and since he's a former […] Not rendering correctly? View this e-mail as a web page [here](. [Empire Financial Daily] How Open-Heart Surgery Led to Launching My First Newsletter By Herb Greenberg A funny thing happened on the way to starting a new venture in activist short selling... Something else came along. It was an out-of-the-blue e-mail from Enrique Abeyta, a source from my days as a journalist, that simply said, "Catch up?" This was about a month into my new gig, and since he's a former hedge fund guy with a short-selling bias, I thought maybe – just maybe – he wanted to share a stock idea we could chase. Not even close. Instead, Enrique wondered if I would consider joining him and a few of his ex-hedge fund friends at an investment newsletter company they had started... for individual investors – long-biased, no less. My first reaction was: You've got to be kidding. Long-biased, after all, isn't exactly on brand for me. Nor are these types of newsletters – especially with their often over-the-top marketing campaigns. And the timing – yikes! – with the market at all-time highs? The cynic in me knew what that meant. Still, that got me thinking... Maybe it was time to do something different... very different – and maybe even (gasp!) a bit more upbeat. For years, originally as a journalist, I carved out a niche of flying red flags over companies... For a while, I was even CNBC's in-house skeptic – going all the way back to a weekly segment playing the foil to the eternally optimistic Jim Cramer during the first year of Mad Money. I later levered my skeptical side into a business, co-founding two institutionally oriented short-biased research firms. It was a great run, but then... I walked away – handing the keys over to my business partner. I had simply stopped having fun and was bored to the point of practically sleepwalking through the days. After nearly seven years of pouring all my energy into our firm, working weekends and vacations – even publishing a report on an insanely rocky ship while crossing the notorious Drake Passage on my way to Antarctica – I was worn out. Looking back, I barely stopped long enough in March 2020 to have heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. While my surgery and recovery thankfully went without a hitch, I never had a chance to reflect on what had just happened because I landed back home in San Diego into the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic... and a lockdown. And I was back at my desk the very next day – albeit at half-speed – throwing myself into the business. Maybe it was the emotional upheaval of COVID, which seemed to break the momentum not just for me, but for everybody. Maybe it was the exhaustion of providing short research in a market that seemed to do nothing but go straight up. Maybe it was a delayed response to my heart surgery. Maybe it was a little bit of everything. What I knew was that I needed something new... anything to reinvigorate me as I headed into what I hoped would be the final stretch of my career. Enter... activist short selling. Activist short sellers seemed to me to be the only people still outing corporate frauds, and the diligence that goes into it is something I've done much of my career. It's the stock market equivalent of jumping out of a plane, with fingers crossed that the parachute will open. There is no salary. You're paid on the back end. It's high-risk, high-reward... and if it works, high-adrenaline. I've always been a risk-taker with my career... and this would be the ultimate risk. I figured the worst that could happen would be that I would fail. --------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended Links: [DO NOT BUY GOLD RIGHT NOW]( Many experts are saying, "Buy gold." But we recommend you do something much different – for the chance to double your money on some surprising stocks. The details come from Herb Greenberg, a financial investigator. So far, you could have doubled your money 14 different times with a clever strategy for 2022 from Herb's team. [You can access the full details (and a free recommendation)](. --------------------------------------------------------------- [Steve Jobs' 'Final Prophecy' now coming to life]( Steve Jobs' ability to predict the future was remarkable – now his "Final Prophecy" is coming to life, with huge implications for you and your money. And that's exactly why investing legend Joel Litman has just prepared the most fascinating and useful analysis I've seen in many years... [Click here to view](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Anybody who knows me knows that I'm wired to work... I thrive on digging, collaborating, and publishing – and not waiting months to do it. It's what I do. If I'm having a good time, I stay a while... when bored, as my resume shows, I cut my losses and move on. So here I was... Despite doing everything that goes into starting a new business – including all the legalities and even having a website built – it was like I had suddenly fallen off the grid. My phone stopped ringing. My e-mails dried up. No texts. I was working in dead silence – not just in terms of noise, but in terms of the intensity that drove me all those years. Then it dawned on me... I had unintentionally throttled back, something I had never done in my 47-year career. At the age of 69, the feeling was, well... weird. (Wait – I'm 69?) This new, slower pace, it turns out, was both brutal (as in, not fun) and possibly a blessing... It was almost as if I was on a sabbatical. I became deeply introspective and, like so many people during the pandemic, began reflecting on my past – reassessing where I was in my life and seriously pondering what I really wanted to do going forward. For the first time, I started thinking about the sheer significance of my heart surgery: How they had sliced a 9-inch incision into my chest, sawed open my ribs, spread them apart, and stopped my heart for an hour and 10 minutes while a heart/lung machine kept me alive – and while the surgeon replaced my aortic valve, aortic root, and part of my ascending aorta, with a single bypass of a minor artery tossed in as a bonus. The whole procedure lasted five hours. And here I was treating it almost like just another visit to the doctor. I had just cheated death, and it took several months of working in silence – as well as this era of COVID and the wake-up call it has given all of us – to realize it. With all of that rumbling around in my head, I asked myself: What do I really want to do for the rest of my professional life? Is this really how I want to spend my days? And if I do well, do I really want to live with the likelihood of litigation, harassment, and the overall stress that comes with activist shorting? An even bigger question: Do I really want to spend the end of my career almost exclusively in a "cocoon of negativity," which is where a CEO once claimed I lived? After all, according to the calendar... I'm supposed to be retired. In cardiac rehab, the big takeaway is how to get rid of stress and how to keep your blood pressure low... That's critical to the longevity of the kind of biologic valve I have. In the best of circumstances, it will last eight to 12 years before it needs to be replaced – 15 if I'm lucky. Yet here I was taking on more stress and watching my blood pressure rise. My big surprise after heart surgery was that it didn't slow me down... If anything, I had more energy. But this summer, as I began this reflection and reassessment, I started thinking about how I had almost taken this life-saving surgery for granted. And then I realized... I don't want to be known as the grumpiest guy in the graveyard. And then... how much I love driving up to see my one-year-old grandson, who lives 500 miles away... And how much my wife and I like to travel – and how I would love to take just one trip without having to think about publishing a report after a day of sightseeing. All of that is juxtaposed against the backdrop of still wanting to work. (Crazy, right?) Even now, I never set an alarm, and my body clock geared to East Coast market hours still gets me up between 4 and 5 every morning, including weekends – just because I want to. I had vowed never to retire if I still enjoyed and had the capacity for the mental gymnastics of researching and writing about companies. It's calisthenics for the brain – very much like putting together a puzzle. To this day, I still get a kick out of it. That gets us back to that out-of-the-blue call from Enrique, who had become prolific with several newsletters at Empire Financial Research... I've known Empire's founder, Whitney Tilson, for years. Enrique's pitch to me was to ultimately launch a newsletter under the Empire umbrella. I would also be writing a few essays every week to anybody who subscribes – topics and tone of my choosing. But the real attraction is that it wouldn't be just me... Idea generation and trading strategies would be in partnership with Enrique and another hedge fund veteran and all-around nice guy, Gabe Marshank – the calm, under-caffeinated counter to the intensely over-caffeinated Enrique. Both of them have spent much of their professional lives shorting stocks, and like me, they're cursed with a skeptic's DNA. Ditto for the Empire team, including Whitney and Berna Barshay, another old friend. Even better, the end market is not Wall Street. It's individuals looking for stock ideas – a throwback to my roots as a newspaper columnist. And while most of the ideas will be longs, the plan is for the team to collectively research and publish a few significant shorts a year. After months of careful planning, we're finally launching my paid newsletter later this month... This Thursday, March 24 at 8 p.m. Eastern time, I'm pulling back the curtain on the strategy I've been fine-tuning for the last five months. I've been carefully working through a huge pile of potential investment ideas, vetting dozens of opportunities, and bouncing ideas off some of the smartest people I know, to come up with a portfolio of high-quality stocks to buy today. I hope you'll join me on March 24 where I'll discuss my strategy in detail... share some of my favorite "war stories"... and reveal the name and ticker symbol of one of my favorite stocks to buy today. [You can save your seat for this event by clicking here](. Regards, Herb Greenberg March 21, 2022 P.S. During the event – "The 2022 Wall Street Exposé" – we'll explain what's really causing the huge shake-ups we've seen in the market this year... and how it represents a unique moneymaking opportunity the likes of which we haven't seen in two decades. [Learn more here](. If someone forwarded you this e-mail and you would like to be added to my e-mail list to receive e-mails like this every weekday, simply [sign up here](. © 2022 Empire Financial Research. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, copying, or redistribution, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from Empire Financial Research, 601 Lexington Ave., 20th Floor, New York, NY 10022 [www.empirefinancialresearch.com.]( You received this e-mail because you are subscribed to Empire Financial Daily. [Unsubscribe from all future e-mails](