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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: MCsweet who wrote (59369)4/17/2017 2:02:11 PM
From: Micah Lance2 Recommendations

Recommended By
MCsweet
Spekulatius

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 78918
 
IMO, a significant portion of the 30+% short interest can't be due to trade concerns with China for two main reasons...

1) there are better macro plays on a potential trade war with China where leverage could be applied presumably cheaper too (not sure of the borrow cost to short BIG) i.e. I'm not sure shorting BIG is the best way to play this possible macro event

2) IF the issue is due to a potential trade war then why wouldn't we see higher short interest (near 30%) in other retailers like BIG.

I've looked at this now and when it was mentioned earlier and I couldn't find anything that would show why short interest is so high. They have $900+ million in obligations due within the next year, but they did last year as well and it looks like they rolled out a lot of those obligations as their obligations greater than a year increased by $275 million while the obligations w/in 1 year stayed the same. It looks like they will have to do the same this year and who know how successful that will be.

IMO, this could be the main reason there's high short interest. A discount retailer with little to no pricing power increasing debt to meet obligations in a shaky economic environment... they easily could face liquidity issues if we see further downward pressure in consumer spending.

Hope this helps.