Short sellers of tech-related stocks felt big pain in early 2024 -S3

Unity Software

16/07/2024 20:37

** Technology-related stocks featured heavily among short
sellers' top money losers for the first half of 2024, per the
latest data from S3 Partners
    ** "With the S&P 500 Index ending the first 6 months of 2024
up by 690 points, or +14.5%, being short has been quite a
painful trade," writes S3 Director Matthew Unterman
    ** Unterman says short sellers suffered mark-to-market
losses of $67.6 bln from U.S.-listed stocks, with tech short
sellers down $40.8 bln for the first half of 2024
    ** All but one (Carvana Co  CVNA.N ) of the top-10
money-losing stocks for shorts have technology businesses 
    ** Topping the list was Nvidia  NVDA.O  with $20.81 bln
notional losses, which is losses net of borrow financing costs.
Next was Meta Platforms  META.O  with $4.34 bln in losses for
shorts, Microsoft's  MSFT.O  $3.69 bln and Amazon.com's  AMZN.O 
$3.11 bln losses
    ** Short seller losses were in the ~$2bln to $$2.94bln range
for the next 6 biggest losers with Super Micro Computer  SMCI.O 
leading losses and followed by Broadcom Inc  AVGO.O , Alphabet
 GOOGL.O , Microstrategy  MSTR.O , Carvana and Apple  AAPL.O 
    ** In contrast, the biggest winning bets for short sellers
were a mixed bag with Tesla  TSLA.O  leading the pack, providing
notional profits of >$4 bln
    ** However, S3 notes that Tesla's surge of 28% in Q3 erased
all the short sellers gains for the first half in two weeks,
suddenly putting shorts down an est $1.5 bln YTD
    ** Next in line for winning first-half bets for shorts was
Intel  INTC.O , bringing $1.36 bln profits and then $977.5 mln
profits from Rivian  RIVN.O 

 (Reporting By Sinéad Carew)
 ((sinead.carew@thomsonreuters.com; +13322191897;))