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Edit: repost with positions. If this gets traction I’ll deep dive further tomorrow, used to be a credit analyst.
Many of us may be regards, but we're nowhere near the level of absolute debilism that must rule the HQ of Callaway Golf, where somebody came up with the concept, filmed and SIGNED OFF on and advert of A Man Physically Assaulting A Woman Because She Touched His Driver.
Yes, you read that right: the advert is a man body checking a wife because she dared to touch a golf club.
If you don't believe me, you can find here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAScVbqYimY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAScVbqYimY)
What makes this a good short?
1. Ethical.
2. Self-explanatory
3. Have been dropped by major retailers post ad
4. All Round Management Incompetence
5. If a $2.8bn public company can run this through marketing, production, legal and approval and NOBODY says perhaps assaulting women isn't ideal brand positioning, everybody with a say must be a complete and utter moron. Ergo, your other decision making probably also deeply sucks.
And their financials bear this out (I went through their filings so you don’t have to)
Exhibit A. **They suck at financial decision making and lost billions**. These geniuses bought Topgolf in 2021 for \~$2.6 BILLION in stock, and then wrote off \~$1.9B of it and in January quietly sold 60% to private equity at a $1.1B valuation. That is a certified minus 75% on the single biggest decision this management team ever made. The ad is not an outlier, but on-par with the rest of their decision making.
Exhibit B. **They hardly make any money** (but Wallstreet hasn’t caught on yet). Reported net income: –$1.45B in 2024, –$409M in 2025. Strip out the Topgolf funeral costs and the actual golf-club business earns about $80M a year. This means the market is paying \~35x earnings ($2.8 Bn / 80 M), which is outlandish in this sector, for a company whose management sets billions on fire and then greenlights domestic-violence-themed driver ads.
Exhibit C. **They are handcuffed to a corpse**. They still own 39.3% of the Topgolf corpse, which private equity has now stuffed with $1.25B of "deemed landlord financing," $1.2B of leases, and fresh buyout debt. It lost $73M in the first half of 2026 while paying $95M in interest. Callaway's stake has already melted from $248M to $214M in six months, and per the contract they cannot sell until 2028. Kinda like being stuck in a Saw basement handcuffed to a dead guy whose rot grows & grows.
Exhibit D. **They predict a down revenue for the next half year, with negative EBITDA.** At Q2, they provided a full year guidance of 2.045M, and a 246M adjusted EBITDA. As they delivered 1299M revenue in H1, that means they predict 746M revenue for H2 (which is substantially lower than last year: 830M). Same methodology shows NEGATIVE second-half EBITDA: -29M - -42M.
The only bad news for the bears: they have basically no debt and are sitting on net cash, so this thing cannot go bankrupt, until they decide on their next big money burning acquisition.
Positions: puts, obviously. Not financial advice, I eat crayons.