By Sam Boughedda
Investing.com — Muddy Waters (NYSE:WAT) has taken a short position in Chinese housing broker Ke Holdings Inc (NYSE:BEKE), raising questions in a short report about transaction volumes and store and agent counts.
KE's shares fell premarket but spiked to a high of $21.30 soon after the open before retracing to around 0.7% below Wednesday's close.
A short seller makes a bet that a stock will fall. In the report, Muddy Waters said the company has inflated new home sales gross transaction value by over 126% and commission revenues by around 77% to 96%. A Ke representative wasn't immediately available.
"We found massive discrepancies between the transaction volumes, store count and agent count reported to investors and the transaction data from our multi-month data collection program from BEKE's platform," the activist short-seller said.