Monday, March 10, 2008

Short Interest Screens

There are a number of places on the web that provide short interest. For individual stocks, I am partial to the data at ShortSqueeze.com. Those seeking a broad brush perspective on large short positions and recent changes will likely prefer the short interest highlights from the Wall Street Journal.

My own favorite is the short interest filter at SchaeffersResearch.com. This tool allows users to input data in five fields (see graph below) and generate a list of stocks that meet the specified criteria. I have created one such list below from the criteria specified in the fields below.

Knowing the short interest and associated trends in a stock can arm individual investors with a sense of the collective hedge fund speculative opinion on a particular security. In markets that are trending down, these are often the stocks that get the most severe Whac-A-Mole treatment. On the other hand, when the markets have one of those inevitable +300 days, look for the biggest gainers to be from the list of most heavily shorted companies with the highest short interest ratios.

1 comments:

Bill Luby said...

Following on the heels of my post, Bespoke has some analysis of the S&P 500 short interest, including the SPX companies with the largest short interest -- as well as an interesting data set that I have never seen before: short interest by sector.

For more details, click over to their S&P 500 Short Interest analysis.

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