Analysts short Elizabeth Holmes Forbes photo as documentary hype peaks

Hartwell Ratings on Tuesday cut its credit rating on the famous Forbes photograph of Elizabeth Holmes to junk. The agency says the portrait is now dangerously overexposed. It means this in the market sense, though it has concerns about the lighting too.

The downgrade follows the release of You Can See Everything, a documentary that puts the photo at its centre. According to Forbes, Holmes helped stage the shot and now claims to hate it. Forbes is not sure she really does.

Everyone agrees the picture is having a great year. I do not find this comforting. Great years are how bad decades introduce themselves.

Hartwell has rated the image like a bond since Theranos collapsed. A bond is a loan you can sell to someone else, and a photograph is now apparently the same thing. "Its cultural yield has fallen for nine straight quarters while its price keeps climbing," said senior analyst Graham Pell. "That is not a photograph. That is 1999 in a turtleneck."

The warning signs are textbook. Late-night television is already parodying the documentary. That means retail interest, ordinary people piling in, is near its peak. In 1929, shoeshine boys handed out stock tips (we all know how that ended, and we all pretend we don't).

Inside Hartwell, nine staff now call the picture "iconic". A year ago, none did. "When the risk department starts saying iconic, you sell," Pell said.

The short case

Short-seller Marisol Venn, who profits when things lose value, has bet heavily against the photo's reputation. "Every bubble needs a founder gazing past the camera," she said. "This is the only one where the founder later said she didn't care for the gazing."

Venn fears a reflexive loop, meaning fame that feeds only on itself. The more people talk about the photo, the more it seems worth talking about, until nobody recalls why. "That isn't a story," she said. "That's a margin call waiting for a date."

What frightens analysts most is Holmes's own reported distaste for the image. Traders call this insider selling: the people closest to an asset quietly talking it down. "The original issuer is distancing herself from the product," Pell said. "Historically, that is when you check where the exits are."

Hartwell has also put the documentary itself on negative watch, citing its strong reviews. Strong reviews, Pell noted, are what everything had right before.

I have moved my own savings into a sock drawer. Nobody has ever posed for a magazine cover in front of it, which is exactly why I trust it.