General comments/chat, page-18640

I wonder if success has made some of these shorters believe their own hubris? If so, they'll soon discover leverage is dangerous when you have your fingers inside the pinch point.

I thought these guys only held briefly intraday. But another poster (I forgot who) said the bulk hold much longer. If true, looking at this unemotionally, their position appears more like gambling than investing. With a much smaller mkt cap, the SP sensitivity to news increases. Also, volume becomes a problem, with higher churn to mkt cap required to support the same profits, either for new short positions, or to cover existing shorts without spiking the price. Yet the volume has decreased over the last couple of days. These guys might discover, when they try to cover their positions, the sell depth is too thin. So what looks good on paper superficially, might evaporate. Taking shortman data, which lags 4 days, the short positions are roughly 3 times yesterday's volume. Right now, the entire sell depth is for 6.7M shares (on Commsec). If the current short position is still around 15M, these guys are in serious strife if they need to exit quickly. Obviously, more shares are constantly loaded into the que; I understand volume is a flow, not a stock. Still, having such a large short position relative to volume is precarious. No wonder they have been spamming us with BS. One news bomb drops, and these guys will need to sell their shirts to cover their shorts.