Tracking short interest

[Curt Renz]

So I charted them on top of each other with the left still being the number of shares and the right being the price * shares to come up with a short value (if there is some other metric to use for price, I just took the stock price 3 days before settlement date) You can really see though the the recent drop in shares shorted has actually had a dramatic affect on the dollar power of the shorts.

Thanks for your fine work, chickensevil. The dollar value of the short interest moved exponentially upward until the share price high of late February this year. Your chart shows a somewhat significant pullback despite the recent new price high, but still at the level of this year's start.

We're in the midst of a drought of significant news from the company. Yet there is the potential of great news on the Model X and Gigafactory fronts and who knows what else. The next short squeeze could be quite intensive.

 

[chickensevil]

Ok, one more time here is the one up through the 15th of this month:

I really wish I could put all of this on one single overlay since I think it would show some really interesting information, but as best I can tell, I can only have one secondary Y axis. So with that in mind one more thing I thought I would show of interest is the value of the shorts vs the stock price itself:

Now I will admit I went into this with my own hypothesis and came out not really expecting what I am seeing from these charts. To me, it would seem that the shorts are losing steam... (finally). Which is both good and bad.

To me this means we really have started to finally level out in stock price, meaning I wouldn't expect exaggerated moves from here on out unless something changes... The positive side means it will take something truly bad happening to drop the price dramatically. The bad side, I wouldn't expect giant jumps up in price (or less giant jumps) as we are losing the shorts that will have to cover. The stock really is getting too expensive for them. They took the opportunity to use the pull back from the last run up to 240 in order to cash out. I would expect as of now, people will slowly continue to cover or cash out of the stock which might help move it up a bit more, but I think the "great short squeeze" is finally coming to an end.

 

[chickensevil]

And for the sake of sharing data, I uploaded my spreadsheet into google docs so you can get an idea of the raw data I pulled together for this. I am more than happy to do other charts or pull in more information to add to it!

TSLA Short Data - Google Sheets

 

[jhm]

Wow, they owe us about $6B. Next time someone asks, "Is Tesla really worth $33B?" I might respond, "Is shorting Tesla really worth $6B?" Also worth noting, longs collectively own $39B in Tesla.

 

[chickensevil]

Toyed around with it some more and I want to get feedback on this chart (man this took a long time to actually make this work...) I went for the vertical stacked look instead of the overlay look. The only way I can think to try to do a stacked look is to end up going with some kind of normalize through decimal value (very similar to how I actually got this chart to work) but overlap the data instead.

Whatever you all decide on being useful I can easily update the data every two weeks with a new chart

 

[emupilot]

With "only" 22 million shares shorted, does that leave extra capacity for shorts to knock down the price of TSLA? Since every single one of them will be underwater if TSLA goes any higher, I'd imagine alot are willing to double down on their shorts to keep that from happening.

 

[jhm]

It seems like lately the shorts haven't been trying very hard to break down the price. Low volume has given them plenty of openings and there are small tactical moves, but it seems their heart is really not into it anymore. Meanwhile bulls have been down right docile. They give bears very little run up to knock back down. I think time is on the side of longs. So it seems good to wait on shorts to depress prices while Tesla builds out a business.

 

[chickensevil]

Short interest data should be released today at 4PM I will collect it together and update my charts when I see it posted.

 

[chickensevil]

Ok here goes. Short data has continued to drop as of 29 August, although keep in mind this was before the final run up into the 280s so the really interesting data to see if shorts have started to pile back on will come in 2 more weeks. But this continues to show the trend of short data falling and shorts bailing out.

Underlying data added to this:

Settlement Date	Short Interest	Short Value	Stock price (3 days before settlement date)	Avg Daily Share Volume	Days To Cover
8/29/2014	21,660,743	$5,669,482,872.82	$261.74	4,041,118	5.360087

 

[DaveT]

Thanks. Can you post a chart with just the short interest and stock price overlaid?

 

[chickensevil]

Here you go, Hope this helps. I will try to get unlazy this time around and see if I can get a chart that overlays all three data sets while I sit here entertaining myself with the NV Legislature Session re: Gigafactory.

 

[chickensevil]

Well, here you all go, a chart with all three data points stuck on top of each other, I can hypothetically add a 4th, 5th, nth line of unique data to the chart if someone feels it would be useful, but after 3 I feel this could get quite cluttered.

Edit: Super Edit... We are going to pretend that the other things just never existed... Here you go! I bent Excel to my will! Enjoy this chart, I hope it makes sense, and if you don't like how the data is overlaid or whatever let me know and I can easily tweak it.

 

[adiggs]

Here you go, Hope this helps. I will try to get unlazy this time around and see if I can get a chart that overlays all three data sets while I sit here entertaining myself with the NV Legislature Session re: Gigafactory.

View attachment 58764

It's remarkable to me seeing how flattish the number of shares short in the company has remained, over an extended period. Starting in April 12, short interest has floated between 20 and 30M shares (short dip below 20M, couple of brief spikes over 30M). But that number of shares is remarkably stable to me in a company that has gone from south of $50 for the first year of that chart, to over $280 today.

The question of course - are we at the low point of an up and down cycle, and we're about to see a wave of new shorts piling in to the tune of ~5-8M shares in the months ahead, or will the ongoing short interest start to materially drop? I think that this short interest graph and tracking is the best proxy variable I've yet found for measuring how strong the difference in opinion about the company is among the "investors" in the company.

Very high short interest tells me that we still have two camps of people who almost literally can't talk to each other, because they're using different languages that the other just doesn't understand (we understand each other's words - both camps think the other is dwelling on the wrong important factor). This significant inability to communicate between the two camps is important to my long term investment thesis, as it tells me there are deep pocketed 'people' that deeply do not understand the paradigm shift that has happened, and that see a significant money making opportunity on the short side (because they don't understand the paradigm shift).

 

[chickensevil]

Well, if anyone looked at the chart 2 posts up: Tracking short interest - Page 26

Look again, I changed it from the time I originally posted the thing and completely hacked that post up... sorry.

 

[Robertj]

Many thanks

great chart , with the 3 items captured

 

[TSLAopt]

Many thanks

great chart , with the 3 items captured

Short interest creeped up 500k shares as of end of day trading on Sept 10th when the stock closed at 281.1

this is good news to me as it is the first time in a while that short interest has gone up (although not by a very significant amount)


what will be really interesting is to see what the short interest is as of the end of trading tomorrow (for settlement t+3 on Sept 30) which will be published on October 9th. I hope it has increased by over 1-2mm shares on this down move from 281 down to the 250s

 

[chickensevil]

Well here are your new charts. The big thing that stands out to me is as we were hitting all time highs shorts certainly started to pile back in. The big thing to notice is that our minor increase in shares shorted (~530k) amounted to quite a substantial increase in the cost to them to play at the 281.10 share price of $569 Mil. So I think that says a lot about their determination that the price would fall from that point by piling in half a billion dollars! This isn't your retail investors shorting here, this has GOT to be institutional driven, cause that is a boatload of cash.

One additional observation (for anyone trying to keep track here), the 281.10 post date (9/10/2014) was AFTER pulling back from the all time high, and AFTER Elon made his comments (both happened on 9/4/2014). But! It was BEFORE AJ released his note and said he agreed (that happened on 9/15).

So the thing to keep an eye on, will be if the short interest is relatively flat or decreases I think we can safely say they gave up (I am talking about less than 500k increase in shares would be what I would consider them giving up, 500k or more and they would still be in it to see the stock burn). If however we see more than 500k shares shorted by the time this next number is released, I would suggest that they are piling in again in earnest to drive the price down.

Unfortunately, all of this is delayed data, which really makes it hard to say what they are trying to do and predict where it might be going from here.

A note about the charts: I had to shift all my scales because we breached 275 which kinda threw everything off when I expanded to cover our new high price on the chart of $281.10. In order to keep a similar look on the merged charts, I had to change all the scales up by about 18% to account for the increase. It doesn't overlap the data with quite the same visual punch as previously on the key shift on the short data that happened in March, but it is close enough.

 

[TSLAopt]

Looks like we are down 2mm shares in short interest...I don't like this sign personally, but I believe this is after the Mercedes selling and so perhaps it has something to do with the hedge Mercedes may have had on their long position (e.g. If they owned puts then the market maker who sold them those puts would have needed to be short TSLA stock to be hedged on their short put position)

Settlement Date Short Interest Avg Daily Share Volume
10/31/2014 20,946,314 5,559,589




Read more: Tesla Motors, Inc. (TSLA) Short Interest - NASDAQ.com

 

[Perfectlogic]

Personally I like a high short interest too as it does nothing but add fuel to a rally. You might be on to something regarding the Mercedes hedge, but whatever the case we are coming from a huge short interest, and the stock hasn't been budging to the point the shorts have been hoping for. We have only fallen below $200 for a short period in the last 10 months and the trend line is clearly going up. I think the short "community" is slowly breaking as they continue to be wrong about the stock and the story of Tesla is getting stronger by the quarter. The typical short argument of Tesla being "extremely overvalued" is slowing falling apart as Tesla ramps up production super fast, next year Tesla will only be valued at 4x revenue, and the year after 2x revenue, and that is high margin revenue. The shorts illusion is crumbling under the weight of reality and I think the trend of falling short interest (was 30mil a year ago) will continue.

 

[adiggs]

Personally I like a high short interest too as it does nothing but add fuel to a rally. You might be on to something regarding the Mercedes hedge, but whatever the case we are coming from a huge short interest, and the stock hasn't been budging to the point the shorts have been hoping for. We have only fallen below $200 for a short period in the last 10 months and the trend line is clearly going up. I think the short "community" is slowly breaking as they continue to be wrong about the stock and the story of Tesla is getting stronger by the quarter. The typical short argument of Tesla being "extremely overvalued" is slowing falling apart as Tesla ramps up production super fast, next year Tesla will only be valued at 4x revenue, and the year after 2x revenue, and that is high margin revenue. The shorts illusion is crumbling under the weight of reality and I think the trend of falling short interest (was 30mil a year ago) will continue.

An additional reality check as well. Yes the short interest is coming down 2m shares or so in the latest update. We're still above 20M shares on 140M total shares (with less than that in the float). That's still a very high short level in absolute terms (meaning: compared to other companies in the market), even if it's getting lower and lower in relative terms (meaning: relative to previous short readings on Tesla).