Tesla short sellers under pressure after most profitable trade in 2022 |

NEW YORK, 6 january (Reuters) – Short sellers targeting Tesla Inc ( TSLA.O ) shares as they renewed their best-ever year, led by Elon Musk car they put more pressure on the manufacturer.

Traders hoping to profit by selling the borrowed shares and buying them back later at a lower price increased their short positions in Tesla to about 79 million, according to data from analyst firm S3 Partners. That’s about 4% or 325 million over the past 30 days, the data shows dollars means a new short sale worth.

Tesla short term interest rate a month ago 14 billion 8.76 below the dollar billion dollars or about 3% of shares, reflecting the steep decline in Tesla’s stock price.

Reuters graphics

Tesla shares have fallen nearly 65% ​​in the past year. Musk’s Twitter social The decline accelerated after he decided to buy the media network, which some investors saw as a distraction from the billionaire CEO. Shares of Tesla fell 7.9% to $101.81 on Friday, before rising 1.2% to $111.69 12 Aug 2020is the lowest indicator since . Shares are down about 9% so far this year.

“Shorts seem to think the stock has lower risk,” said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners. “When the stock price hits a floor or expected value for short sellers, they will start taking positions to realize their profits … We haven’t seen that with Tesla yet,” he said.

15.85 for Tesla investors in 2022, according to S3 data billion dollars making a paper profit USA was the most profitable short trade in the market. It was the best year yet for Tesla short sellers, but they 2010They recovered only a quarter of the estimated $60 billion in losses from 2018 to 2021.

“Some shorts are certainly taking profits, while new shorts may be riding on expectations that the downtrend will continue,” said Evan Niu, an analyst at Ortex who tracks real-time short interest data.

Traders tend to be bearish on Tesla options, prices It implies a 53% chance that the stock will fall more than 12.5% ​​over the next three months. According to Refinitiv data, the put option indicates only a 31% chance that the stock will rise more than 12.5% ​​over the same period.

Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed; Added by Noel Randewich and Chuck Mikolajczak report; Edited by Lananh Nguyen and Richard Chang

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2023-01-09 03:04:22
Source – reuters

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