Last week again saw the ASX200 chop around, running fast to get nowhere.
The Incredible Shrinking Short Table continued to shrink last week, with two more stocks dropping out to leave a mere fifteen 5%-plus shorted.
One of those stocks was New Hope Corp ((NHC)), which jumped in from below 5% the week before to 6.8% shorted, and last week dropped out to below 5% again.
I explained last week this was all to do with the arbitrage opportunity created by the company’s announced convertible issue – short the stock and buy the note, which contains an implicit stock option at a discount.
See
Summary:
Last week saw the ASX200 chop around, running fast to get nowhere.
The most notable event in Short Land last week was that of four stocks dropping out of the 5%-plus shorted table, and none coming in. This leaves a mere 17 stocks on the table – a table which back in the day could number in the 40s.
Nothing like a bull market to shake out the shorts, although the index is currently struggling to make any fresh headway.
In last week’s report I’d noted Kogan ((KGN)) shorts had fallen to 10.6% from 11.8%, ahead of the announced Sydney lockdown. Kogan proved popular with lockdown inmates last year. But last week shorts bounced back up to 11.5%.
By Tim Boreham, Editor, The New Criterion
The saintly stocks versus the sinners: which ones perform the best?
In a new era in which environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations have been enshrined in the way fundies pick their shares, the so-called ‘sin’ stocks had been largely discounted as relics of the past.
Until Woolworths’ spin-off of
Endeavour Group (EDV) came along, that is.
By virtue of Endeavour’s sheer size and pure-play focus on booze and pokies, the bifurcation creates an awkward dilemma for ‘saintly’ Woolworths holders who tolerated the sinful stuff as a minority contributor to the grocer’s earnings (about 27% of total underlying profits).
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