Short Sellers Signal Concerns About Ford (F)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 21, 12:44PM EST

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Short interest in Ford Motor (F) was already extraordinarily high in December, but this month it rose over 30 million shares to sit at 175 million. The figure stands in contrast to Ford’s shares which have moved from $6.85 on December 13 to $8.30 on Friday. Perhaps as Ford inches toward it 52-week high more investors are willing to bet against further progress.

Ford’s new CEO has said that the company’s restructuring is ahead of schedule. And, lower gas prices could give a longer shelf life to gas guzzling vehicles in Ford’s SUV and pick-up product lines. Ford’s market share last year was 17.5% in the US, but the company has used a figure as low as 14% as a bottom point for sales before the company can begin to recover.

The Ford bet is a simple one. The company will almost certainly be able to fire enough people and close enough plants to hit its cost reduction targets. With $23 billion in new debt, the chances that the company will have cash problems this year or next seem fairly small.

But, the short community may have the feeling that, with Honda (HMC) and Toyota (TM) gaining market share in the US almost every month, that Ford cannot resurrect its unit sales in time to save the company.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

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.