Today's rally was pretty extraordinary by any standards and challenged the adage that elephants don't gallop.

  • 107 companies with market caps greater than £1bn rallied more than 5% today
  • 64 of those cleared more than 10%
  • 17 were up over 20%.

Those are gazelle- like in their moves but to mix metaphors, many were tubo boosted: propelled by the shorters burning in their wake.

A lot of that upward momentum was assisted by short covering : the below graphic shows today's price gain in green while the blue bar shows the % short interest in that name . Nearly all of today's biggest gainers appear to be assisted, at least in part, by short squeezes : Rolls-Royce Holdings (LON:RR.) having had 5% short while the likes of Cineworld (LON:CINE) was 9.4% short , Hammerson (LON:HMSO) 7.7% short

The next few days will prove even more interesting but there is little doubt of the significance in today's change in sentiment. The FTSE 100 made its first close above its 200MA since the Covid crash today while the 250 has resolutely cleared it having just crossed over last week. As for the Covid trade, many of the double digit losers today were in that camp as the AIM All-Share stalled on the vaccine news having had a wild rip since March.

We are likely at an inflexion point and a pretty violent start to the rotation towards the new normal....

(The below are taken from visual data mining reports available at https://runprofits.com)

5fa9892b9a526shorters.jpg

Click to view enlarged image

5fa987de4965bsector_shorts.jpg

Underlying Data

For the data wonks, here's some of the underlying data and the short, medium and long term moving averages compared to current price (green is above MA, red is below MA and intensity of each colour indicates degree of difference).

(table below available in the RP Scanner on https://runprofits.com in the Daily Short Interest Trade Ideas).

Given the pop in oil today and the relatively muted response in shorted oilers below (compared to T&L, A&D names) , many of these are probably due a bounce in the coming trading sessions.

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