Thursday, September 15, 2022 11:35 am10 Comments

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Tesla spent 864 days as Wall Street’s biggest short bet. Now it’s Apple. A total of more than $18 billion is bet against Cupertino, research firm reports, overtaking longtime leader Tesla for the first time since April 2020.

Emily Bary for MarketWatch:

Apple Inc. is now Wall Street’s biggest short bet, displacing Tesla Inc., which had held the title nonstop since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Short interest in Apple was $18.4 billion as of Wednesday, while short interest in Tesla TSLA, 0.88% was $17.4 billion, according to research from S3 Partners.

The gradual change largely reflected short sellers trimming exposure to Tesla, rather than big changes in actively shorting of Apple, S3 Partners’ managing director of predictive analytics Ihor Dusaniwsky wrote in a research note.

“While short interest shows us dollars at risk, it does not show us the short trading activity that directly affects a stock’s price,” he explained. “Increases or decreases in short interest are a function of an increase or decrease in shares shorted and the change in a stock’s price,” he said. “Therefore, if shares shorted stay static but a stock’s price increases, its short interest increases — but with no short-side trading in the stock, short selling or short covering, the change in short interest has no effect on the rise or fall of the underlying stock’s market price.”

MacDailyNews Take: So expect the anti-Apple FUD fomenting out of the shorts to ramp up.

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