Good News & Bad News, page-23163

Most companies are shorted in one form or another to a certain degree, but would say miners/commodities are the favourites. In more developed markets such as, nickel, copper, gold, etc they short the physical commodity using instruments such as put/call options. For example, an institution lending to a miner can minimise its risk exposure by hedging their bets through said derivatives.

An example where they might pile on to a stock, is a junior mining explorer, raising capital at a discount. Shorting activity in this case is to smack the share price back to the capital raise discount price, an often while their at it, they hit it harder for a bit more coin...