What you will see below
performance of the most highly shorted stocks;
performance of the factors most related to shorting;
characteristics of the best shorts over the last 30 days;
list of recent “plungers”.
Friday comes to the shorts’ rescue again. Investors boosted highly shorted shares through Wednesday. Navitas, Solaris Energy and beleaguered Kohl’s stocks rallied hard. Kohl’s has 46% of its shares short, Groupon has 44%. We would be careful of a sharp squeeze in both cases.
Our tracked risk factors strengthened further and are dangerously overbought.
Which risk factors are rising/falling?
• Rising factors comprise: Low Market Cap, Low Stock Price, Aggressive Industry Groups, High Momentum (12,1), High Days to Cover
• Falling factors comprise: High Debt/ EBITDA, Cyclicals.
• No factors changed direction.
Over the past 30 days, the best shorts underperformed the universe by -18.2%, (-18.9%, vs. -0.7%). Compared to the universe, they:
* were $1,951mn smaller cap,
* had 24% higher beta,
* had lower long term forecast earnings growth,
* had higher next 12M sales growth,
* had lower next 12M EPS growth,
* had weaker 12M momentum,
* generate higher value-add,
* are less capital intensive,
* are investing less currently,
* have lower EV/S multiples,
* have higher EV/EBITDA multiples,
* have higher short interest ratios,
* have higher days to cover.
The “plungers” list this week includes Sable Offshore Corp., Forward Air, Korean Deposit, Build-A-Bear Workshop and a gaggle of biotechs.
