Big increase in short selling in Yahoo!

Wed, 2011-08-24 18:19

Yahoo! is the first really interesting name captured by a new weekly website section highlighting shares which have seen a recent 52 week high or low in short interest across global names. Also being picked up is the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank and various airlines. On the flip side, there is evidence of some short covering in US energy firms. In Japan, Mazda is in the list alongside Nikon. It was this screen that first showed up Sino Forest back in the spring.

In this 40 company report published weekly (and moving to daily in due course) we cover four regions, North America, Europe, Japan and Asia ex Japan. These weekly updates will systematically pick out interesting names from the underlying universe with no editorial content from our side, save for a sanity check of the output. The methodology will be to screen the universe of shares in the data region which have seen a recent (within the last 7 calendar days) 52 week high or low in short interest. Shares also need to have short interest of greater than 3% (measured as the percentage of shares outstanding on loan), and more than 21 calendar days away from a dividend record date. The resulting top 5 shares by market cap will then be featured in the update.

In an effort to occasionally suppress the urge to cover companies we have written about before – and know the story – we bring you this totally objective weekly highlights package. The genesis is a regular report that shows those firms hitting a fresh annual high in terms of short selling. Already, this list throws up an interesting name in Yahoo!. Shares on loan in YHOO have more than doubled in the last couple of days.

The results today for the four data regions are as follows:

North America

Recent 52 Week High