Short positions from last Friday are now visible on Shortman, showing that about 14M shorts or 0.8% were closed out on the day. Presumably most of that was in the closing auction, coinciding with the MSCI selldown.
Looking at the short charts for CRN along with fellow MSCI index demotees JIN, JLG and RPL supports my suspicion that much of the recent build-up in shorts was actually in anticipation of the MSCI rebalance. For each of these, there was a big drop in short positions on Friday, accounting for roughly half the buy volume at close.
The other three shares in particular follow a similar pattern of unwinding short positions that had been built up over the last two months. CRN still has an extra 10-20M short interest over the same time period (after the S&P index selldown in March), giving a rough idea of how much recent shorting might be actual negative speculation specific to CRN.
There were still 45M or 2.7% shorts remaining on CRN in total, facing a theoretical maximum gain of 10c and a theoretical maximum loss of $infinity. It'll be interesting to see how much gets squeezed out this week.
CRN Price at posting:
16.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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