I believe the answer is "no". Myer has been the biggest shorted ASX stock for most of the last year with only Metcash occasionaly passing it. Currently the MYR shorted stocks are around 20% and totals around 117 million shares. If the shorts do not sell more during this capital raising then the shorted percentage will drop to around 14.3% because of the increase in total shares. Also I believe it would have been very difficult for the shorts to have bought all of those shares back prior to this capital raising and certainly if they had tried to buy 100 million shares or so, the share price would have gone up massively. So now, they can take up shares via the capital raising or via the big recent turnovers because of the capital raising. Clearly if they buy back now, they have made a massive profit from their shorting and got out much easier than they would without a capital raising.
Also after the capital raising Myer will have very little net debt (approximately 50m) and it is at its lowest price since it was relisted back in 2009 at $4.10.
Not only will Myer no longer be the largest shorted stock, I expect it to be out of the top 10 largest shorted stocks not long after this capital raising finishes. I think it will be good for the share price.
GPASAS
MYR Price at posting:
91.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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