Short sellers now have EV, renewable energy stocks in sights
Short sellers are now targeting electric vehicle makers — Tesla (TSLA), Rivian (RIVN), Lucid (LCID) — and small-cap renewable energy stocks in new campaigns. Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre joins the Live show to detail the highest-ranked stocks in the energy and automotive sectors on short sellers' lists.
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Video Transcript
- As the green energy space struggles, the short sellers are now coming out. Ines Ferre is here with the details. Ines.
INES FERRE: Yeah, that's right, Josh. Short sellers are going after green energy stocks. EV stocks as well. And this is from a report from Hazel Tree. This is a firm, a Treasury and liquidity management platform for asset managers. And what they do is they take a look at the sentiment surrounding shorting around several stocks, around stocks in the S&P 500, and they divide it up into three categories large cap, mid cap, and small sized cap.
And among these categories, you see that EV stocks, which some of these have been shorted in the past and we have seen, for example, Lucid has high short interest, Rivian as well, Tesla. These were some of the stocks that were among the top 10 shorted stocks in October within the large cap and mid cap stocks.
And the report assigns also a crowdedness score representing securities that have the highest percentage of funds that are shorting those. So one deviation, by the way, from this EV and renewable space is the oil giant ExxonMobil, which was the most crowded large cap stock in October with a score of 99, that replaces Tesla after four straight months at the top of the shortage security list.
And among the small caps, they've been seeing some of the renewable names, some of the solar names that have been coming into those lists of shorted stocks. Renewables such as Sunrun, RUN that's a ticker, also Sunnova Energy, those were among the top 10 crowdedness lists of securities.
Now, this is following a trend that we have been seeing in the market where renewable stocks have been getting pounded. So they have obviously been on a downward trend, that's also where the short sellers pound on these stocks as well. The EV market, some of these EV stocks in the last three months, you've seen those go down more than 30%.
Some solar and wind energy stocks, those are down 50% in the last several months. That is in part because of this high interest rate environment, the cost of capital is more expensive, as you guys were just talking in your previous segments. And so in this higher interest rate environment, demand concerns are surfacing here.
- Ines, thank you for that.
