EXCLUSIVE: A Lot Has To Happen For Whitney Tilson To Close His Lumber Liquidators Short Position

Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc LL shares fell 15 percent on Tuesday after Whitney Tilson revealed he was -- again -- shorting the company.

In a new email to Benzinga, Tilson explained that quite a bit would have to happen for him to close his current short position.

"If I'm wrong about the cancer scare devastating sales and, instead, sales start to pick up, losses diminish and eventually the company returns to profitability, PLUS it reaches affordable settlements with regulators and lawyers," Tilson wrote, he'd reconsider his stance.

Although Tilson doesn't currently have a price target on Lumber Liquidators shares, he said if the market were to price the company with a 50 percent bankruptcy risk (a key crux of his latest thesis), shares should trade "quite a bit lower" than they're currently at.

News of Tilson's 2016 thesis comes one year after Lumber Liquidators was first mentioned negatively in a 60 Minutes report about formaldehyde-laden flooring. The stock is near $12 per share as of this writing, about one-third of what it was in April 2015.