Kyle Bass’s Texas Feud Spotlights Short-Selling Tactics

Ernest Poole had been dead for more than 60 years when someone opened an account in his name at an online platform called Harvest Exchange. Poole, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was best known for his sympathetic pieces about the Russian Revolution. The platform was strictly for capitalists.

Poole was a pseudonym for Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager who had taken out what amounts to a Wall Street bounty on a Texas real estate investment trust called United Development Funding. Best known for shorting subprime mortgages ahead of the financial crisis, a Powerball-type win that brought him ...