“The short interest in Apple Inc. recently dropped 9.6% to 65.7 million shares, a possible sign that traders who benefit from falling share prices have stepped away from the company as its stock continues to soar,” Douglas A. McIntyre reports for 24/7 Wall Street.
“The measure of short interest in Nasdaq stocks is as of March 13,” McIntyre reports. “The wisdom of the short sellers’ decision is supported by the movement of Apple’s shares since the beginning of the year. Despite its mammoth $744 billion market cap, Apple’s stock is up almost 15%, compared to an improvement of less than 6% in the S&P 500.”
“Short sellers betting against Apple for a longer period may have been burned as well,” McIntyre reports. “Apple’s shares are up 91% over the past two years, against a 54% improvement in the S&P 500.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There are better bets than betting against Apple.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Why are there ANY shorts in Apple when you have such ripe pickings in:
Samsung
Microsoft
Amazon
Google…
Clearly those 10% have more money than sense.
The shorts hit last Friday and dropped the price to 125.90.
Actually, it was because of options trading, rather than short-selling.
If you’re a long-term investor, none of this should matter anyway.
1. The data is 3 weeks old. That was then. This is now.
2. Is there a way to get newer data ? That’s my question.
With 5.8B shares outstanding, 65M share represents about 1% of the total # of shares. Doesn’t seem much but heavy trading on those can significantly affect the share price.
With the Apple Watch preorders coming up soon, shorting maybe harder to win on. Following that will be the product release day which will undoubtable result in sold out stock over the weekend.
If the shorts can spread FUD over the next month about potentially production / quality issues then maybe they can make some cash.
They’ve already started that with the supply constraint issues. The Dow hasn’t been good for Apple so far.
Finally, something in the long term AAPL investors favor.
Sure this isn’t ass backwards? If you haven’t noticed Apple is down. So much for the Dow Timber.