Short Sellers Double Down on Amazon
Amazon saw the number of its shares short jump for the most recent settlement date of April 15. Short interest in this stock has been building up since mid-October.
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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) saw its short interest jump for the most recent settlement date of April 15. The number of shares short in this stock has been building since mid-October, and short sellers have more than doubled their positions since then.
Some 5.76 million shares were short at the end of the two-week period, which was up from the 4.97 million shares on the prior settlement date. In the same period of last year, 4.95 million shares were shorted.
Note that only six months ago, short interest was only half of where it is now, coming in at 2.51 million shares in October. Also in this same period, Amazon’s stock is up about 7%.
The average daily share volume for Amazon was 2.90 million shares, which would give short sellers about 1.99 days to cover.
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24/7 Wall St. recently reported on Amazon:
This is the absolute leader in online shopping, and it remains a technology anchor for many portfolio managers and also is a member of the BofA Securities US 1 list. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) serves consumers through retail websites that primarily include merchandise and content purchased for resale from vendors and those offered by third-party sellers.
The company serves developers and enterprises through Amazon Web Services, which provides computing, storage, database, analytics, applications and deployment services that enable virtually various businesses. AWS is also the undisputed leader in the cloud now, and many top analysts see the company expanding and moving up the enterprise information value chain and targeting a larger total addressable market.
Like every year, online sales continued to grow in 2020, especially during the busy Christmas shopping period, and as a result of the COVID-19 shutdowns, and Amazon remains the go-to portal for many shoppers.
Excluding Thursday’s move, Amazon.com stock had underperformed the broad markets with a gain of nearly 5% year to date. However, in the past 52 weeks, the share price was up closer to 41%.
Amazon.com stock traded around $3,440 on Tuesday, in a 52-week range of $2,256.38 to $3,552.25. The consensus price target is $3,993.18.
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Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics. Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications. A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.
