Why It’s Important: While short reports have been a regular fixture for investors for years, both from investors who are betting against the stocks themselves with their own short positions, newer reports from the likes of The Bear Cave by Edwin Dorsey come from an investor who claims to never take stakes in the companies he writes about.

Whether short reports are being done to make profit betting against the stock or to provide public information for investors to make their own decisions on investments, the big question is why the increase in reports over the last several months.

There’s likely two big reasons why.

The first big reason for the increase could be because of the narrative that short sellers and short reports will be targeted by the new White House administration.

Muddy Waters’ CEO Carson Block said Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both publicly criticized short sellers in the past.

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“We’ve already had some rhetoric, we might have some more anti-short seller rhetoric,” Block told Bloomberg.

Block said Republican-led administrations are often lighter on enforcement, but he’s not sure if Trump will roll back regulations.

“It is a question as to who is going to head the SEC,” Block added.

The comment comes as SEC Chairman Gary Gensler recently announced he will step down on Trump’s inauguration day, ahead of the assumption that Trump was going to replace him with a new leader.

Trump Media & Technology Group (NASDAQ:DJT), which was co-founded by Trump, has targeted short sellers and alleged that naked short selling is the reason the stock has fallen in price several times.

Musk, who has often publicly criticized short sellers, recently said he wanted to “obliterate” short sellers.

The other reason for the increased short report volume could be due to stock market indexes trading near all-time highs and strong year-to-date gains.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY), which tracks the S&P 500, is up 26.0% year-to-date. This return is currently the fourth best in the last 10 years and the ETF could still pass the returns of 26.2% (2023), 28.8% (2021) and 31.2% (2019) to move up the list.

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This article Short Sellers Are Back – Flurry Of Big Calls From Muddy Waters, Citron And Others Raises Questions: Why Now? originally appeared on Benzinga.com