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Short Sellers Double Down on Amazon

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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) 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.

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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