Mitts received his B.A. in Liberal Studies from
Georgetown University in 2010, J.D. from
Yale Law School, and Ph.D. from
Columbia Business School in 2018. Mitts said that the 2021
GameStop short squeeze was case of traders banding together to take down hedge funds. In 2022, Mitts published a number of analyses on online trading data and the online presence of
short sellers and claimed that certain players were manipulating the market. Mitts pointed to what he said were potentially manipulative and illicit trading activities and alleged securities fraud by investors. Mitts' work was considered in federal probes into certain activist short sellers such as
Carson Block and certain hedge funds such as Block's
Muddy Waters Research that published negative reports on certain companies, which lowered their stock price. He called the work by Mitts "a non-empirical, conflict-laden polemic based on misrepresentation, selective presentation of data, and lack of academic integrity. In 2023, Mitts co-wrote a research article asserting a potential link between people he alleged had foreknowledge of the October 7
Hamas attack on
Israel and shorting of an
ETF that tracks Israeli stocks. The head of trading at the
Tel Aviv Stock Exchange criticized what he called the report’s "flawed analysis", pointing out among other things that the Mitts report was 100 times off when it cited price movements using
shekels, while in fact the data was referring to
agorot, worth one-hundredth of a shekel (and thus the Mitts report overstated its findings a hundred-fold), and said "This is a flawed analysis from the outset and there is a lack of understanding of how the local market operates ... There was nothing unusual in short positions in the stock exchange in the two months before the attack." Also at odds with the conclusions of the Mitts report, the
Israel Securities Authority said "examinations found ... that the average short balances for shares traded on the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange declined during the period preceding October 7th." == References ==