quick review of open interest going into the earnings - still heavily tilted on the call side but now a few more puts involved too. 315 at the money strike highlighted in yellow. i posted the 5/5 weekly and the 5/19 monthly expirations. not enough open interest at the 5/12 expiration to bother.
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now going to turn my attention to the image below, posted by
@Wenche on the market action forum (linked below). i have been following the ib short updates for some time. although they don't give you exact number of shares shorted by customers, they do update weekly with this type of bar chart. the big long left bar you see is the value of tesla shares short, the second bar is the value of vxx short. keep in mind vxx is a volatility tracking etf that basically erodes towards zero constantly. voting with their dollars, a meaningful percentage of traders is saying tesla is a much safer short than something that has historically done nothing but go down, reverse split, and then go down some more.
although no scale is given, you can compare the short value to other stocks before and get some idea if shorts have increased or decreased. as of 4/14, the value of tesla shares short was 15% lower than the value of vxx short. at 4/28 the value of tesla short is nearly 50% greater than value of vxx short. similarly vs. a different stock on the list like vmw i find that on 4/14 the value of tesla shares short were about 8.5x vmw, and today that difference is 10.5x. use some assumptions and estimations, i come to the tesla short shares having increased by 10-15% over the last 2 weeks.
in summary i have to agree that the shorts are not only not backing off, they are adding to their positions. perhaps the biased sample of stinking alfa authors that troll these forums is not the best indicator of the average short.
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