The recent market volatility has led several investors to consider other options. One alternative approach that’s gaining attention is ‘short selling’, where investors bet against individual stocks or even broader market indices. Short sellers are taking the opposite side of the coin, financially benefitting when stocks or indices decline in value.

7investing’s approach is and always will be long-term, buy-and-hold investing. But even so, we think there’s value in understanding what short selling means and how it takes place. Are there specific signs that companies show which tend to attract the attention of short-sellers? Are there specific risks that short-selling entails that investors should be aware of? How do short sellers actually set up their trades and make money? And are there pockets of the market that tend to attract a significant amount of attention from those who are selling short?

To help us answer those questions, we’ve brought in an expert. Evan Niu is a financial analyst with ORTEX, which is a financial analytics platform for investors. One of the key metrics that Evan and ORTEX reports is a company’s short interest, which is often quite difficult to calculate or to find publicly.

In an exclusive interview with 7investing CEO Simon Erickson, Evan describes what it means when investors ‘go short’ a stock. He defines technical terminology such as short interest and free float and explains what happens during a short squeeze. Evan and Simon discuss how several of these metrics could be useful for investors, even those interested in establishing long-term positions.

In the final segment, Evan and Simon dig in to the electric vehicle industry. Due to its capital-intensive nature and its fast pace of innovation, there are several EV companies who carry a high short interest. The two take a closer look specifically at Tesla, Lucid Group, Nikola, and Fisker and discuss whether there are opportunities in this space for investors.

Investors who are interested in ORTEX can register for a free account with limited data access here: https://app.ortex.com/register

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Fisker, Lucid Group, Nikola Corporation, and Tesla. 7investing’s advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies mentioned.

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction: Overview of what short selling means

02:26 – Reasons why investors might borrow a stock

05:15 – Defining free float and short interest. Why are these metrics worthy of investors’ attention?

09:32 – Anatomy of what happens during a short squeeze

11:16 – How is short interest formally reported and disclosed?

16:17 – The current state of several heavily shorted electric vehicle stocks

Transcript

Simon Erickson 0:00
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s edition of our 7investing Podcast where it’s our mission to empower you to invest in your future. I’m 7investing founder and CEO Simon Erickson. We are, of course, always long term buy and hold investors here at 7investing. But today we’re going to take another angle on the stock market, which is short selling and short interest, and what implications could this have for the stock market, for stock prices and for long term investors.

I’m very excited to welcome our guest today Evan Niu is a financial analyst at ORTEX, which is a financial analytics platform for investors. Also an old friend of mine, Evan, it’s nice to see you again. Thanks for joining me on the 7investing Podcast.

Evan Niu 0:26
Yeah, former Fools back together.

Simon Erickson 0:27
That’s right, Evan. So we got a bunch to talk about, we’re going to talk a little bit about electric vehicle stocks, which is kind of a sector that is heavily shorted out in this space right now. We’re talking about what a short squeeze means and technically what’s going on with that. But maybe let’s just kind of give a refresher first and foremost, a 10,000 foot level, what is happening when a company is sold short, what does that actually mean?

Evan Niu 1:02
Sure. So just kind of start with a basic primer. Short selling is when you borrow stock, you go out in the market and you sell that stock at a high price. And your goal as a short seller is to hope that the stock price goes down. You buy back the stock at a lower price, then return the shares that you borrowed. Because you borrowed shares, you had to borrow money to borrow shares. So it kind of flips the whole, buy low, sell high in orders. Now you’re selling high and then trying to buy low. But there’s a lot of important dynamics, because where do you get that stock, right? You have to borrow that stock from somewhere, which is very different mechanic than just going out into the market and buying the stock if you’re long only investor.

And there’s a whole industry of securities lending where people will put up their stock, they’re willing to loan out because there are typically fees associated with borrowing, you have to pay to borrow most of the stocks. So if you’re an investor that has the stock, someone will pay you to borrow it. So that allows you to kind of generate an additional source of income to your portfolio that can add to your returns, if you’re willing to lend it out. Knowing that there’s a good chance that that stock’s gonna be used to sell short, and maybe push the price down a little bit.

Simon Erickson 2:12
That makes a lot of sense. Now there’s some interesting dynamics, like you said, but the borrowing is certainly different than what we’ve gotten used to, just buying stocks and then selling them later. Other than selling a stock short would there be any other reason why somebody would want to borrow a stock out on the market.

Evan Niu 2:26
And that was actually one of the fairly interesting things I learned recently, since I joined this company a few months ago. Which is that there are actually a few other different reasons to borrow stock, because I think most people think that the only reason to borrow stock is to sell it short. But there are a few others, let me pull them up here. So the main ones are Settlement Certainty. So that’s, for example, if an investor needs to borrow stock to deliver on a separate trade that otherwise they might fail, if they didn’t actually secure the stock on the initial trade, and they need to come come up with that stock now to deliver on a trade.

Market Making, so sometimes a broker will lend out a clients list. Let me make sure I’m not mis-characterizing. When a broker lends a client’s sell list and borrows the buy list, and lending out positions over time to avoid impacting the market. Which is essentially is like market makers have a lot of, they have to trade a lot to kind of do their role in providing liquidity to the market. And sometimes that involves short selling the stock just to provide liquidity.

Collateral, sometimes, people will use borrowed securities as collateral for another trade, such as a swap or derivatives transaction. Because a lot of times you have to put up collateral for any type of stock holding. So sometimes you get that from another one. These things, it’s a cycle of lending. And it’s really crazy how many levels it goes.

Here’s another one that’s a little bit more straightforward, which is Dividend Arbitrage. So sometimes you’ll lend out stock to a domestic investor over the dividend record date to avoid foreign investor taxes on dividends.

So these are some other reasons out there. I mean, short selling is still the predominant reason to borrow stock. But it’s important to know that there’s other reasons out there because ORTEX reports on how many shares are on loan. But that number doesn’t match up necessarily to short interest. And the reason is, because there’s other reasons to borrow stock. On top of that, sometimes someone will book a loan, but then cancel later in the day, or it will get closed unfulfilled. So they bought the stock and never actually shorted it. And then they’ll give it back later, if for whatever reason, they decided to not do the trade. So there’s just so many moving parts here. And it is pretty fascinating.

Simon Erickson 4:40
There are a lot of moving parts, and I know at ORTEX you guys track a lot of those metrics, it’s very useful to actually kind of see this and the implications that could have especially if you have a company with a very high short interest. The ultimate question I want to ask next is, we can see that a short interest sometimes can exceed 100% of the free float of the publicly traded float? Before I asked you that question, though, can you define for me what a short interest actually means? Or what a free float actually means? And then we can actually get into some of those more complex questions.

Evan Niu 5:12
Yeah, real quick, let me also mention just where we get our data, right. So ORTEX gets data from 85% of securities lenders at the wholesale level. So we get a pretty good comprehensive picture of the lending market, there’s a good 15% of the market that we don’t capture for reasons that aren’t really worth exploring here, because they’re too in the weeds, but we do get a very good statistically significant sample of the overall market. So that’s why we feel pretty good about the numbers.

Back to the your question on the free float thing, which is definitely has come up a lot lately ever since the whole GameStop (NYSE: GME), AMC (NYSE: AMC) saga from last year. But people will say, how can you short over 100% of free float, which is, free float is the number of the estimate of how many shares are being publicly traded today. It’s a subset of shares outstanding. So shares outstanding will be some big number. Free float is basically, if you look at all the people that are restricted from selling, or can’t sell, or don’t want to sell. So for example, corporate insiders, they have lockup agreements, or all sorts of reasons they can’t sell their stock. Or if you have a big corporate investor that owns 10% of your stock, they’re probably not interested in selling. So those shares aren’t being traded.

But you look at the free float number. And then short interest is just how many shares have been sold short as of this moment in time. And that percentage, looking at short interest as a percentage of free float will give you an idea of how heavily shorted the stock is. And the higher that number, the more likely the short squeeze will occur, which is, a short squeeze is when, let’s say, the stock starts going up, short sellers start to lose money, and they want to bail on the trade. But to do so that the buyback a cover, and that buying pushes it up, pushes other shorts out. And it just kind of creates a self feeding cycle where you get these huge rallies, like we saw in GameStop and AMC. Then at the same time, while as we mentioned fees earlier, sometimes these short sellers are paying really high fees to maintain these positions, to borrow the stock.

So if you’re getting squeezed on price action, you’re paying huge fees to maintain this position. That’s a good, that’s a recipe for you to bail on your position, it’s going against you very rapidly, as a lot of these cases, that’s what happens. And as far as how it can go above 100%. You know, let’s say you have investor A holds 100 shares, they lend those to B. B short sells those to C. And C is long 100. But then let’s say C short sells again. So in that situation, you started with 100 shares. But as people keep selling and lending and selling, it’s a cycle, you can actually have 200 shares short to 100 shares long, that still nets out to 100 shares. But you also have 200 shares short.

Like the way that I like to explain it sometimes, in a way that I think most people can also understand. Is think like a bank, right? The way a bank works is, person A deposits money, the bank lends out the money to someone else that goes and spends the money or lends it out again, and banks create money supply through this lending cycle. It’s the same thing for short sellers, right like, or for securities lending, like you have a certain number of shares supply, but then as that is lent out multiple times has this multiplier effect that is very similar to what traditional banks do that increase or decrease money supply in the broader economic system. So it’s fundamentally like the same mechanics. And that’s how you end up with situation where you can have more shares short than exist in the free float.

Simon Erickson 8:51
Let’s get back to the short squeeze there for a second Evan. Because this a phenomenon that, of course, long term investors, or people who are long the stock, love to see. You love to see a stock price shoot through the roof because of this phenomenon. But like you mentioned, it’s because a lot of people who are short the stock, betting against the stock, are quickly trying to bail out of the trade, cover their short positions. And that puts a lot of buying pressure on the stock which pushes the stock price up. You look at a lot of data out there. Do you have a rule of thumb on the percentage of outstanding shares that are sold short that tends to indicate that perhaps there’s a short squeeze possibility in the future? You have a rule of thumb on that? Or is it just completely different for every company and every industry out there?

Evan Niu 9:32
It’s really hard to say because there’s so many factors. Certainly the directionality, like the higher the number, the more likely it is right? But but it’s hard to say if there’s some specific threshold where you start to see like the probability increases, because there’s so many different like factors that are going into it. For example, like a lot of times the prices get disconnected from fundamentals when this is happening. Because, again, the people that are buying this stuff are just trying to get out, they’re not buying it because of some fundamental thesis or some long term anything. It’s just I need to buy the stock at whatever price I can get it at. And that leads to this disconnect. And that’s why a lot of times, you see the price reverts back down pretty quickly. Like most short squeezes only lasts like a day or two.

Whereas this GameStop, and AMC stuff has been persisting for a year, in part because those companies were raising capital through the squeezes with aftermarket offerings, that actually strengthened their balance sheet. So they actually did change their fundamentals because of the squeezes, which most companies don’t go to that extent to, like, actually lean into and capitalize on what’s going on out there. But like, there, there’s just so many factors. And like, sometimes you’ll see a fundamental event is the catalyst. But then the proportion of a move doesn’t make sense for like that fundamental event. But it can lead to very disproportionate movements. And a lot of mean reversion stuff will come back down pretty quickly, most of the time.

Simon Erickson 10:58
We’ll get to the electric vehicles in just a minute here. But my final question to kind of wrap up the what’s going on out there is, short interest isn’t something that’s so easy to find all the time, right? It’s not just going to be put on the very front page of an investor presentation, or anything else like that. How do you actually calculate short interest? How do you guys do it in your calculations for the metrics that you’re doing?

Evan Niu 11:16
That’s also a really good question. And it’s very important to realize how this data works. So the only like, in the US markets, the only time, the exchanges report short interest twice a month, and there’s like a delay of like seven trading days or something, it’s like a week and a half. And they report data on the first or last month and like the 15th, right. So there’s basically two data points, two settlement dates per month, where that is the official correct exchange reported data. But because of that delay, if you’re a trader, and you’re trying to create a short squeeze or pursue these types of strategies, you’re looking at stale data that’s from like, a week and a half ago. It’s really hard to use that data in an actionable way if you’re trying to make these trade these types of trades.

But those are the correct official verified FINRA reporting dates. Everything in between those two dates is an estimate. And there’s no way to know with 100% certainty what the correct answer is at any given time, right? Outside of those two very specific closing dates at that moment, right. So everything else, including from ORTEX or any other short interest providers, there’s only a couple people that try and provide short interest, because it’s very difficult to estimate. They’re all inherently estimates. And, different companies have different methodologies. Again, ours, we leverage securities lending data, and we use many other inputs and factors that we run through our algorithm. And we do a lot of fine tuning to it, and machine learning. And we’re always trying to improve the accuracy.

But all you can do is, we’re deriving these real time estimates every day, throughout the day, real time. That’s not to say that that estimate is 100% correct at all times, because there’s no way to know, right? Like the market is so massive. All these stocks are trading millions of shares a day and like, there’s no way that you can say with absolute certainty, as of this moment, this is exactly the correct answer. But what we can do is, we look back, right? So we have our numbers that are provided in real time every day. And we provide historical, we track it all in the charts and provided it to our customers. And then later on, when the exchange reports the data. And that’s the correct answer. We go back and compare it, we say, how close were we? So that number we calculated two weeks ago, or whatever it was, and then we compare, and sometimes we’re off, right? Like, these are estimates, and there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty with trying to estimate this number. But, yeah, sometimes we’re gonna be off, but sometimes we’re very, very close.

So and then we use that information to feed that into our machine learning to improve going forward. And we’re constantly reiterating, trying to get as accurate as you can. So to the extent that we can, we feel like we’re getting close to the right answer, most of the time, and, more importantly, that we’re capturing directionality of it. So like, even if we’re off, we almost always have the correct direction. So if short interest is rising very quickly, we will generally have that trend captured and presented on our platform well before the exchanges report it. Even if the exact number is off by a little bit, you can see that, hey, we’re pretty close. And the overall trend of direction is what we predicted it would be.

So that’s what we feel good about, and confident in that, hey, we’re doing our best to provide this very hard number. And sometimes we’re pretty damn close. But other times might be a little off, but we’re always working to improve that going forward. And we’re also very transparent about it. So for example, on our platform, we allow our users to chart all of these numbers. You can chart, an insane number of data points around all this stuff. So for example, you can chart our estimate, which includes confidence intervals that will expand and contract based on like volatility and various factors that affect our confidence number. And then you can track the official correct answer, and you’ll see them, they tend to really track really close. So we do feel confident that we are providing pretty good numbers. And but again there’s that trade off, right? It’s like our number may not always be 100% correct. But you have the real time, so you can actually use it more quickly than the correct number. That was two weeks ago.

Simon Erickson 15:33
Well, we had some fun with this Evan. We actually had you pull up a report off of ORTEX. It was called the State of Heavily Shorted EV Stocks, electric vehicle stocks. Now we’ll get into the companies in a minute here and have some fun chatting about this. But maybe let’s start at the 10,000 foot level. I’ve talked with you about electric vehicles quite a few times over the years. Why is this sector so interesting for short sellers? Why do they want to short sell electric vehicle stocks out there?

Evan Niu 15:59
Well, it’s funny, because for the longest time Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) was the biggest short trade in the market. It was at, I think it got 30%, 40%, 50% of float short at different points. But in terms of the dollar value.

Sorry, my dog is

Simon Erickson 16:13
He has an opinion about this. I think you said Tesla and he got interested.

Evan Niu 16:17
Go away, stop, go away.

Yeah, in terms of dollar value of the short position. Tesla’s was one of the highest in the market, like in terms of how many billions was being held short. But as Tesla has gone up over the years, the shorts have kind of abandoned the trade. Like, as a percentage of the shares, it’s now down to like 3% or 4%, they’ve just given up. And at the same time, you have all these SPACs coming out. These EV SPACs and a lot of them are very questionable. And a lot of numbers don’t look great. I do think there are a couple that I do like, which we’ve talked about before, and we can touch on later. But a lot of them, it is fair to say that a lot of them don’t look super strong in terms of the fundamentals or their likelihood to sustain and become viable companies. And, I mean, we just saw one that just declare bankruptcy a couple days ago, like Electric Last Mile (NASDAQ: ELMS) or something.

So there is some. And there’s been a lot of like accounting questions for some of these more questionable ones, like they’ve had all sorts of issues with bookkeeping, accounting and running out of cash. So I think there’s a tendency to group all of these EV SPACs into this bucket of like, Oh, they’re all crappy companies. But I do think there’s a couple that, if you do deep enough research, that have a little bit more legitimacy. I mean, certainly, they’re still fraught with risks, because entering the auto industry is hugely risky and the most capital intensive industry on earth. So it’s definitely, they’re all very risky. But I think that some have a better shot than others.

Simon Erickson 17:51
Let’s double click on Tesla a little bit. This is an interesting one. You mentioned, like 30%, 40%, 50% short interest for a little while there. And then you’ve got Elon Musk, sending shorts to people that are going short, they get burned on this stock. Tesla went through the short squeeze, the gamma squeeze, the lemon-lime squeeze, whatever it was called. The stock shoots up to $1,500 a share. It seems now it only, according to the report you sent us, 3% of the free float of Tesla shares are sold short today. That’s significantly lower than any other company on this list. Are people terrified of shorting Tesla right now? And how important is Elon Musk to the thesis that is either long or short Tesla stock?

Evan Niu 18:34
Yeah, I think so to your point. If you’re looking on ORTEX right now, we have it at 3.25% short float right now. Back in 2019 that was 35%. So huge reversal over the past couple of years. And I think that like, it’s all related, right? Like Elon has demonized short sellers regularly over the past many, many years. I mean, he’s also antagonized the SEC, that’s another topic altogether. But he has been railing against the short sellers for so long. And at the same time, and I think what that’s done is helped really rally the retail shareholder base to really kind of push back against them.

And I think it’s almost as if like that, the whole topic is kind of created like, it was almost a precursor to the GameStop, AMC stuff. Because it creates this kind of like ideological aspect to it, right. Like this good versus evil, like oh, short sellers are evil, let’s rally against them and beat them. Evil hedge funds are shorting it. And I think that some people forget that short selling has some value, right?

Like, the not the people are just like speculating, but some of the activist short sellers out there in the market, really do uncover corporate fraud that otherwise could persist for years and result in substantial losses for shareholders, right. Like, I mean, look at Luckin Coffee (OTCMKTS: LKNCY) a few years back, some short seller, sent people to China to sit in those coffee stores for eight hours a day, doing on the ground research, taking track of like the order numbers, and really putting together really comprehensive pieces that there’s a lot of really, a lot of fraud going on, misconduct and self dealing, and like the way that they would funnel money between self owned subsidiaries and all sorts of shady stuff, right? But a short seller uncovered that, and that was legitimate fraud.

Sure there’s plenty of other examples where it’s just like, oh, I just hope this company fails, and I’m gonna bet against them. And they’re not actually doing anything to uncover fraud. They just kind of like yelling on the internet. But I think that like, people do forget that like, some good can come of this activity. And, Elon definitely doesn’t see that. He’s definitely antagonized and demonized it to the point where the retail shareholder base of Tesla has really driven up the price in an effort to kind of drive out the shorts, and it seemed like they’ve won so far.

Simon Erickson 20:59
It’s interesting, I really liked that you pointed out this is such a capital intensive business. And like you mentioned, Tesla a couple of years ago, I had conversations with very smart investors, CFA charterholders investors, that were very convinced that Tesla was about to go bankrupt. Too capital intensive, didn’t have the cash flows, they weren’t selling enough cars, they were spending a ton of money on capacity, and everything else. And now you see Tesla at a 3% short interest versus 50%.

But several of them on this list. Evan, these are kind of other smaller companies. I don’t think we’re still having the conversations about Tesla going bankrupt today. But perhaps some of these other companies on this list, whether it’s Nikola (NASDAQ: NKLA), whether it’s Fisker (NYSE: FSR), whether it’s Lucid (NASDAQ: LCID). I mean, there’s kind of the same conversations that are taking place. Lucid is it at, at least the numbers I’m looking at right now are around 23%, short interest, Nikola at 34% and Fisker at 37% short interest. This is a capital intensive industry, electric vehicle production is not an easy task by any means. Do you think that there is risk of these companies going bankrupt? Or is this excessive pessimism in the short interest that’s appearing in this chart for these kinds of companies?

Evan Niu 22:07
I think there’s a mix of all of it, right? Like, I wouldn’t overgeneralize any of these because these are all valid concerns, as you mentioned. But whether or not any specific thing applies to any specific company that’s like, on a case by case basis, you should look at it. So for example, like Nikola had some very serious allegations around fraud too, around pushing a truck down the hill and pretending it was powered by hydrogen. And like, that’s a pretty valid concern.

And then there’s always concerns about do you have enough capital to actually ramp production. A lot of these companies don’t. Even if, for example, Lucid, which I own, and we’ve talked before, and I’m bullish on. I think fundamentally, Lucid is very solid, they have plenty of cash, they have a very strong corporate backer in Saudi Arabia is their largest shareholder that if they need money they’ll just go to Saudi Arabia, who’s very invested in trying to revamp their image as a country because it’s all oil money. They want to try to have a greener image. So I think that they do have an interest in really supporting Lucid as a kind of a, that’s part of their strategy to nationally ramp.

But that being said, even though I think Lucid has great technology, they have sufficient cash to enter and ramp, and they do have strong leadership. There’s also a question about valuation, right? Like some of these short sellers, even if they’re not doing this activist on the ground research that we’re just talking about. Their thesis might simply be that the stock is overvalued, even if you think the company is fine. Like, operationally, you could still argue that the stock is overvalued, for whatever reason. I mean, Lucid is like a $30 billion market cap right now. And they’ve sold like a thousand cars. So you could argue that there’s a big disconnect there. And it’s hard to say if you’re right or wrong, but that’s a valid point. And the stock might come down just from that.

They say things like Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN), Rivian is extremely well funded. They’ve entered production. They didn’t, they’re not a SPAC. I mean, they went public through a traditional IPO. But similar kind of thing, right? Like, there might be very valid concerns around their valuation. When I mean, when they were, they hit $175 within a few days of going public, which was like $100 billion valuation for a company that at that point, had delivered like 10 cars. So even if you think that these companies have a good chance, even with the risks that they face, even if there’s a good chance that they’ll make it there could still be a very valid concern around when the market is getting too ahead of itself and things are getting overheated around valuations. Like last November when a lot of this stuff peaked before this whole market downturn. A lot of these stocks are trading at humongous valuations that I’m obviously not surprised it came down. But maybe the extent you could debate on how far they should have fallen. But I’m not surprised that $100 billion valuation for Rivian was sustainable.

Simon Erickson 24:56
Makes a lot of sense. There’s certainly some implications for investors. It’s an interesting data point to be keeping an eye on. Like you said, whether it’s a quality company that is just got a high short interest because people are betting against it going bankrupt for the wrong reasons. Or maybe it is potential that there are problems brewing, maybe fraud is being exposed, it’s certainly something to keep an eye on as institutions are taking short interest.

Anything else that an investors should be watching or thinking about when it comes to short interests, when it comes to short selling, Evan that we that we should be sharing with our audience for this discussion.

Evan Niu 25:26
I think that it’s just important to, because I know that 7investing, most of your customers are going to be genuinely geared towards long term fundamentals. And I think that probably the biggest takeaway, if you’re a long term, fundamental investor, as it relates to short interests, yeah, I mean, if a stock squeezes for a day or two. If I’m a long term investor, I’m probably not, I’m probably gonna ignore it, right? Like, I’m probably not going to try to call the top and sell it at the top or something.

But it’s also good to just note, like, A, if you see a big movement, is it caused by a short squeeze? Or is it caused by some fundamental news that actually affects the long term thesis? Or, B, I think probably the most important thing would be is, do the short sellers have a point? Right. Like, is there a real thesis for why they’re short? And a lot of these short sellers are happy to publish their thesis? Like there’s plenty of activist short sellers that will put out their thesis. Obviously, they’re trying to drive the stock down by putting out these short reports. But as a long term investor, you should read those reports. And like, the bear to your bull right, like, do they have a good point? Like, what is their argument? What is their thesis? And why are they short? And if they’re actually giving you a fundamental short thesis, and how does that reconcile with my bullish view of the company’s long term prospects?

Simon Erickson 26:51
Once again, Evan Niu is a financial analyst at ORTEX, which is a financial services platform for investors to take advantage of more information is more power for you as an investor.

Thanks, Evan, for joining me on the 7investing Podcast here today.

Evan Niu 27:04
Thanks for having me.

Simon Erickson 27:05
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. It is our mission to empower you to invest in your future. We are 7investing.