GameStop short-sellers reload bearish bets after US$6B loss
Katherine Greifeld and Bailey Lipschultz, Bloomberg News It s a bit scary : UBS strategist on speculative rally in GameStop VIDEO SIGN OUT
Despite a punishing two weeks and relentless chat-room taunting, GameStop Corp. haters are showing no signs of surrender.
GameStop stock equal to 139 per cent of its available shares has been borrowed and sold short, a bearish position showing mark-to-market losses of over US$6 billion year-to-date, according to data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners. That figure is little changed since last Thursdayâs 141 per cent short-interest reading, even though GameStop shares have surged roughly 78 per cent in the past two days alone.
The great boom of special purpose acquisition companies in 2020 is creating another one in its wake: a boom in SPAC shorts.
So far this year at least six companies that went public by merging with a shell company, known as a SPAC, have been targeted by short sellers.
And short sellers, who are using SPACs as a screen to look for ideas, say more are on the way.
“We have a few SPAC ideas we’re kicking around; lots of dogshit there,” said Muddy Waters’s Carson Block, who in November came out with a short against MultiPlan. In a research report that month, Carson said MultiPlan was losing its biggest client at the same time the “juice” had been taken out of it by its private equity owners. (The private equity owner, Hellman & Friedman, said it was committed to the company and remains its biggest shareholder.)