Ah, Wirecard, the company that's trying to get two Financial Times journalists prosecuted for exposing their fraudulent accounting:

https://aboutus.ft.com/en-gb/announcements/ft-statement-on-w...

Well it's not so much the company trying to get them prosecuted, as it rather is Munich's district attorney that actually is investigating against them.

According to this article https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/bafin-verdaechtigt-ft-j... there is an investigation in insider trading related to the Ft-article series (naked short selling allegedly rose before the publication of the articles)

Wait, naked short selling is unrelated to insider trading.

Insider trading is illegally profiting on information that was given to you in trust, while naked short selling is short selling without a documented ability to deliver the stock.

As far as I can gather from english language articles, the regulator has banned short selling in response to an article alleging fraud at wirecard. Bloomberg describes this as "unprecedented".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-18/bafin-ban...

today's FT front page headline 'Wirecard relied on three opaque partners for almost all its profit' 'Dubai-based unit of German payments group was not audited'

'Al Alam Solutions, a Dubai-based payments processor with skeletal operations in the Emirate, is the largest of the three “partner” entities. Wirecard refers clients to Al Alam in return for a share of any processing fees as commission. A former Al Alam employee said the business had six or seven staff in total and “the boss” was Oliver Bellenhaus, a Wirecard executive. The other partners are PayEasy Solutions, a Philippine payments group that shares an office with a Manila bus company, and Singapore-based Senjo. '

https://www.ft.com/content/a7b43142-6675-11e9-9adc-98bf1d35a...

Whilst naked short selling can be an offence, in this case the insider trading is the of the short selling before the news came out. The fact its naked happens to be irrelevant to the insider trading case.

there was more short selling activity in advance of the articles which is now the reason for the investigations (and for the ban of short selling)

I think the German definition of insider trading is more loose and could potentially include someone profiting from spreading fake news.

Why is the regulator acting like the attack dog for Wirecard rather than investigating allegations of fraud on Wirecard’s part?

Wirecard was investigated, and as far as I remember the press coverage, there were irregularities, but no real fraud.

Why are HN commenters on the top of this submission somehow claim there's big misconduct, even some conspiracy?

As a German unicorn, Wirecard seems to be enjoying a certain national handicap which is absent from the British paper’s digging.

A Munich prosecutor threatened investigation into FT and Wirecard was happy to double up on threatening journalists, yet nothing seems to be actually happening. This strengthens the impression that Wirecard is locally protected.

Wirecard has pretty much zero mindshare in Germany. Almost nobody has ever heard of it, the only reason why a few people have heard of it is that they are one of the Apple Pay partners.

I really doubt there is much local protection. Wirecard is no VW.

German regulators are known to be on the stricter side compared to other EU countries and Banks/Financials aren't really popular in Germany anyway. So I doubt that this plays any role in the investigation.

But so far, the FT allegations didn't prove anything and coordinated short selling ahead of the release of the articles appears suspicious. On the other hand, the FT doesn't back down so there should be some merit to their stories.

Wirecard will present an external audit report these days about the allegations that Softbank will probably already have seen. The news about the investment probably indicates that the report isn't too bad for Wirecard.

So.... why is a German financial regulator probing a British newspaper? That seems extremely fishy, if FT was wrong then Wirecard should have brought a civil suit for defamation.

Potential market manipulation happened primarily on German stock exchanges, there's no reason anyone else but German regulators would investigate here. If you manipulate US stocks it's also the SEC that investigates, not the regulator in the home country of the trader (they might be involved though).

Because the alleged financial misconduct by the journalists affected a German company? Seems regular to me.

I have a feeling SoftBank in 10 years time will firmly be placed in the annals of history as being the very definition of dumb money.

Between the breadth of their investments and the favorable terms they can get due to their size and positioning it seems very unlikely they'll significantly under perform the market in the long term. Quite literally, they're so diversified it seems very unlikely that they can completely burn the money.

It seems unlikely for them to outperform, but I don't think it's likely that they'll be notably underperforming.

Define "the market". They are diversified across the "new tech" sphere, which on average produces mostly losers and a few big winners.

Diversified tech funds or VC funds as a category, which mostly ignore the large cap and mega cap sphere, have historically underperformed the market except for a group of elite VCs.

What this means for Softbank remains to be seen, but the very act of dumping this much money indiscriminately into new tech cos may have juiced valuations to the point of hindering future returns on the basket.

They are spending crazy money at the tail end of a long bull run. It would not be the first time they messed up in this way.

I guess making, then losing, then making hundreds of billions of dollars every few years gives Softbank a “unique” perspective

It’s an RLC circuit, not a wire.

it's possible, given their retarded investment in bitcoin.

If you're referring to the recent WSJ article, SoftBank did not invest in Bitcoin, it's founder and CEO Masayoshi Son did.

They also got a ton of Bitcoins since 2013, so I doubt they are hurting on that particular asset.

I recently tried to integrate to Wirecard for one of my projects and it was a nightmare. Documentation sucked and once we spent 7 days connecting they told us that the API was being deprecated and we have to migrate to a new one which turn out to be 30 days of more integration. Fun time.

We had a similar experience with Vantiv, whose parent company (Worldpay) was recently bought with about $50 billion. I just can't understand how business works sometimes.

Out of interest, did you guys give up, plod on or pick someone else?! If so, who?

We somehow managed to make it work, can’t exactly remember the details but I think at some point it involved us sending them desperate emails (or maybe phone calls, can’t remember exactly) asking them to please change some settings on their side of things so that we would be able to test as close as possible to “live”, it took them at least two or three days if not more to make the change, which created unwanted dead time for us.

To say nothing of the fact that at some point we spent at least two days practically hitting a wall over and over again: we were sending the requests exactly as their not-so-great docs were telling us to do but the response was totally different from what we were expecting. In desperation we somehow managed to contact them (meaning my boss sitting on a phone call with them) to realize that the dev instance they had provided us with still needed some small change on their side of things. Totally non-transparent framework and it all seemed as fickle as a castle made out of sand.

For comparison we had the best experience implementing Stripe, it was like night and day compared to Vantiv. Unfortunately at the end of the day you need to implement what the stakeholders want.

The linked source seems to be down. And, judging by this and its URL, it would seem to be a rather sketchy outfit, anyway.

Bloomberg on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/softbank-...

Note that this does not seem to be one of Softbank’s Myopic Vision Fund investments, but rather a standard strategic investment including an actual working relationship going forward.

I think SoftBank has too much money either don't know how to do with it, or don't know how to do money management.

I think its a sign of the late economic cycle, nothing is cheap and titans have already been established in the last 11 years.

I'd be inclined to hold my money and see what shakes out of the next inevitable market shake up. But then i'm not running softbank for good reasons....

It likely is, but I do wonder how much QE has played into permanently raising the prices of assets.

I won't make that bet, but it could very well be years before something major happens.

So many companies doing IPOs lately, seems to me we are reaching a top. Private money running out, lets go for public.

For tech, yes. But does that mean the whole economy or tech sector goes into a recession? I.e. will the fact that Uber tanks after IPO have an effect on Apple?

2008 was a housing bubble and it cut everyone at the knees.

Housing is a huge component of the US economy. Total value in 2018: $33.3 trillion [1], 1.6x GDP (20.9 trillion) [2].

Tech is about 5% of GDP [3].

[1] https://www.housingwire.com/articles/47847-us-housing-market...

[2] https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-gdp-5-latest-statistics-and-h...

[3] http://www.ianhathaway.org/blog/2017/5/31/how-big-is-the-tec...

You're comparing the total value of all housing to GDP vs. an actual percent of GDP. That's not an apples to apples comparison.

A quick lookup tells me construction is about 4% of GDP. And financing/ancillary services for that construction, if I had to estimate, might make up another 2% at most. Which is pretty close to tech

Yes, but what happened in 2008, and caused the crisis referred to by rapsey, was that housing lost a large fraction of its value. It was not a drop in construction, financing etc that tanked the economy; it was the loss of value, which left a giant hole in balance sheets.

The apples-to-oranges comparison was introduced by rapsey, I merely provided the numbers.

Some real stinkers as well (although some ok ones).

My guess is that Uber will be the poster child that kills this IPO season or at least comes to define it.

>I think its a sign of the late economic cycle

Agree but I think this late cycle period still has a few more years to go.

Half of that fund belongs to Saudi Arabia which almost never gets mentioned: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-vision-loan-excl...

They have a lot of money and already own sizeable positions in the tech sector. Finding companies that are large enough to make it worth investing while not increasing concentration doesn't leave many options for them.

Seriously need to launch already so I can hitup softbank for some green.

Wirecard? Together with 3V they released pay2d as debit card here in The Netherlands, after which 3V was discontinued. Unfortunately they added ridiculous fees (which their competitor Neteller doesn't have). So I went with them instead.

In other news: SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son Lost $130 Million on Bitcoin

A whole half percent of his net worth.

Some people lose more, relatively, by getting a cat/dog.

Personal investment vs. corporate one.

I don't understand the relevance.