Ford’s Shorts Get Longer (F)
The short interest in Ford skyrocketed in December. The number of shares sold short was up 43.2 million from the previous month to 145 million. That is a big move both absolute and in percentage terms. The shorts could be…
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The short interest in Ford skyrocketed in December. The number of shares sold short was up 43.2 million from the previous month to 145 million. That is a big move both absolute and in percentage terms.
The shorts could be making several bets. First, that Ford is taking too much of a risk by pledging most of its assets to pick up $23 million in debt to help with the company’s restructuring.
Ford’s market share in the US is also falling like a rock. It now stands at 16% and the company believes that could drop to 14% next year. Edmund’s, the car research group, says that Ford’s incentives per car now run at over $4,000.
All of this raises the question of whether Ford can cut enough to catch the falling knife of dropping sales.
Ford’s stock is down from $8.50 to $7.40 in the last month. Bringing in a CEO from Boeing has not helped much, so some investors are willing to bet that F will go lower.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
