Something has puzzled me for ages, and maybe someone has an answer about why WEB is still, and has been, in the top 10 shorted stocks for the past two and a half years.
I'm not a shorter, never have been, so my understanding of it is limited to the basics, which are: You borrow the shares when they're at a high price, sell them immediately to capitalise on that high price, then buy the same number back when they go lower to return them to the lender. You pay a "rental" fee on the shares you've borrowed for the time you're holding them and keep paying it until the shares are returned. So, it stands to reason (to me) that you'd be moving pretty fast to sell the shares you've borrowed, not holding them for ages and keep paying the rental fee.
So it doesn't make sense to me that WEB has been in the top 10 shorted stocks for years. I could understand it when WEB was really high (pre-Covid when it was going for $10-$14). I could even understand it when WEB was in free-fall in April 2020 as borrowing at $8, $6, $4, etc, seemed a pretty good bet.
What I don't get is that WEB was being shorted at $2.50 and continues to be shorted in very large numbers now. Ignoring the fact that the company's outlook is pretty good now (so why would you short it at all?), what I'm not getting is why shorters would either: (a) be holding on to the shares they borrowed years ago and paying huge amounts of "rental" fee; or (b) be borrowing new shares while the price is either pretty stable or going up.
Genuinely perplexed.
WEB Price at posting:
$5.88 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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