As the stock market has surged to records — unbowed by recession, pandemic or warnings of a dangerous bubble — activity has dwindled to a nearly two-decade low for the traders known as short sellers, who make their money betting stocks will fall.
This saddens nearly no one. From small-fry investors to members of Congress, critics paint short sellers as merchants of pain. People around the world celebrated early this year when GameStop’s stock suddenly hurtled higher, causing billions of dollars in losses for short sellers. Many called it a long-due comeuppance.
But academics and short sellers themselves say they provide an important service suited for just this moment: pushing back against stock prices that may be rising too high, too fast. Despite concerns about the pace of the economic recovery and high inflation, the S&P 500 has set 65 all-time highs so far this year, with the latest coming on Monday.
Some critics say stocks look overly expensive, with some broad measures of value close to historical highs. Fewer short sellers in the market means there’s less selling pressure tugging downward on those prices. It can also mean fewer investors looking for overvalued stocks or ferreting out fraud.
“This is the thing that short sellers do, they lean against the wind,” said Charles Jones, a finance professor at Columbia University’s business school, who has researched short selling. “If you have short sellers who are not afraid to do that, you will not get prices that are too high or too low, which is what I think we want when we are allocating capital.”
Jones’ research of Wall Street in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for example, looked at a group of stocks that were particularly expensive to short, which discouraged short sellers from targeting them. They went on to have returns that were 1 per cent to 2 per cent lower per month than other stocks of similar size, suggesting that they had been overvalued.
WATCH | How short selling works
How short selling works
2 years ago
An animated explanation of how people make money from stocks losing value 0:46
When investors short a stock, they borrow the shares from someone else and sell them. Later, if the stock falls as the short seller expects, they can buy the shares, return them to the lender and pocket the difference in price.
So it’s no surprise that short sellers regularly get blamed for driving stock prices artificially low. During the 2008 financial crisis, a few days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, U.S. regulators temporarily banned the shorting of financial stocks, fearing short sellers would undermine already weak trust in them and trigger a run on the system.
Nearly four years later, though, a study by a New York Fed economist and professors at Notre Dame suggested the ban did little to slow the decline in bank stocks, which fell anyway. The restrictions also gummed up trading for bank stocks, raising trading costs in the stock and options markets by more than an estimated $1 billion.
Shorting activity has been trending down since July 2008, a few months before that temporary ban. Then, it was nearly twice the force it is now, accounting for 2.61 per cent of all the shares in S&P 500 companies. Just 1.35 per cent of all the shares in S&P 500 companies were sold short in August, according to data compiled by FactSet.
The stock market’s mostly relentless rise since 2009 has prompted investors to pull dollars out of short-selling funds, helping to thin the ranks of the contrarians. Why go short when everything is rising?
“You have to look at what is causing the market to reach all-time highs,” said Carson Block, founder of Muddy Waters Research and one of the industry’s best-known short-sellers. “It is most definitely not that humanity is at our all-time greatest state.”
The saga of GameStop drew attention to short selling when millions of retail investors worked together to drive up the price of the company’s shares, in order to punish Wall Street investors who had bet against them (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
Instead, he said a big reason is the ultralow interest rates set by the Federal Reserve to resuscitate the economy. Those low rates have sent waves of cash into the stock market, and critics say they’re pushing up prices indiscriminately and allowing weak companies to hold on.
Block specializes in rooting out fraud, and one of his earliest victories came with Sino-Forest, a company that was once Canada’s most valuable publicly traded forestry business. Block released a report in 2011 calling the company a “multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme” that was overstating how much it had in timber investments.
Its shares quickly fell as the report reverberated, and the company pushed back on the accusations. But it ultimately collapsed in what an Ontario securities regulator called “one of the largest corporate frauds in Canadian history.”
Short sellers have also been credited with helping to publicize financial practices at Enron and Tyco International, two of the biggest U.S. corporate fraud cases, in the early 2000s.
Of course, short sellers also get it wrong sometimes. Tesla was a favorite target for years, with short sellers betting founder Elon Musk’s visions for the electric-vehicle company were overly grandiose. Tesla recently posted a record quarterly profit and is one of the few companies in the world worth $1 trillion.
Not all short investors are betting only on stocks to fall.
Consider Marc Regenbaum, a portfolio manager at the Neuberger Berman Long Short fund. Most of the mutual fund’s investments do well when stock prices rise, but it reserves some of its holdings for shorter-term short sales.
Regenbaum acknowledges the frustration that comes after identifying seemingly good candidates to short and then watching their prices climb. A rising tide has sent nearly 90 per cent of S&P 500 stocks higher over the last year. But he said he still believes shorting some stocks can help manage the fund’s risk and offer steadier returns during turbulent markets.
“Everyone thinks of shorting as this element of speculation and making absolute returns, as opposed to hedging things out and offering a smoother ride for the underlying investors,” he said.
Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer of the Leuthold Group, says the average stock in the market recently looked more expensive than it did at the height of the 2000 dot-com bubble, based on several measures. The Leuthold Grizzly Short fund has roughly halved in size in three years, down to $51.3 million US in assets at the end of June.
Ramsey said the stock performance between good companies and bad ones could separate once again, offering better rewards for short sellers, after the Federal Reserve pulls back on its support for markets.
Short sellers need the help. The average stock mutual fund that reserves some of its portfolio for shorting has returned an annualized 7.2 per cent over the last five years, less than half the return of an S&P 500 fund, according to Morningstar. The year-to-year difference can be even more stark. Consider 2013, when the S&P 500 returned 32.4 per cent. Hedge funds with a bias for shorting lost 18.6 per cent that year, according to research firm HFR.
Block, the activist short seller at Muddy Waters who sometimes spars with his critics and haters on Twitter, said he’s not anticipating quitting. At least, not as long as he thinks he sees the economy and markets being mismanaged by people he considers fraudsters.
“I think this is the right thing for me,” he said. “It’s a way to try to monetize my constant state of alarm, my constant state of dissatisfaction at the dystopia unfolding all around us.”
MONTREAL – Travel company Transat AT Inc. reported a loss in its latest quarter compared with a profit a year earlier as its revenue edged lower.
The parent company of Air Transat says it lost $39.9 million or $1.03 per diluted share in its quarter ended July 31.
The result compared with a profit of $57.3 million or $1.49 per diluted share a year earlier.
Revenue in what was the company’s third quarter totalled $736.2 million, down from $746.3 million in the same quarter last year.
On an adjusted basis, Transat says it lost $1.10 per share in its latest quarter compared with an adjusted profit of $1.10 per share a year earlier.
Transat chief executive Annick Guérard says demand for leisure travel remains healthy, as evidenced by higher traffic, but consumers are increasingly price conscious given the current economic uncertainty.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Dollarama Inc.’s food aisles may have expanded far beyond sweet treats or piles of gum by the checkout counter in recent years, but its chief executive maintains his company is “not in the grocery business,” even if it’s keeping an eye on the sector.
“It’s just one small part of our store,” Neil Rossy told analysts on a Wednesday call, where he was questioned about the company’s food merchandise and rivals playing in the same space.
“We will keep an eye on all retailers — like all retailers keep an eye on us — to make sure that we’re competitive and we understand what’s out there.”
Over the last decade and as consumers have more recently sought deals, Dollarama’s food merchandise has expanded to include bread and pantry staples like cereal, rice and pasta sold at prices on par or below supermarkets.
However, the competition in the discount segment of the market Dollarama operates in intensified recently when the country’s biggest grocery chain began piloting a new ultra-discount store.
The No Name stores being tested by Loblaw Cos. Ltd. in Windsor, St. Catharines and Brockville, Ont., are billed as 20 per cent cheaper than discount retail competitors including No Frills. The grocery giant is able to offer such cost savings by relying on a smaller store footprint, fewer chilled products and a hearty range of No Name merchandise.
Though Rossy brushed off notions that his company is a supermarket challenger, grocers aren’t off his radar.
“All retailers in Canada are realistic about the fact that everyone is everyone’s competition on any given item or category,” he said.
Rossy declined to reveal how much of the chain’s sales would overlap with Loblaw or the food category, arguing the vast variety of items Dollarama sells is its strength rather than its grocery products alone.
“What makes Dollarama Dollarama is a very wide assortment of different departments that somewhat represent the old five-and-dime local convenience store,” he said.
The breadth of Dollarama’s offerings helped carry the company to a second-quarter profit of $285.9 million, up from $245.8 million in the same quarter last year as its sales rose 7.4 per cent.
The retailer said Wednesday the profit amounted to $1.02 per diluted share for the 13-week period ended July 28, up from 86 cents per diluted share a year earlier.
The period the quarter covers includes the start of summer, when Rossy said the weather was “terrible.”
“The weather got slightly better towards the end of the summer and our sales certainly increased, but not enough to make up for the season’s horrible start,” he said.
Sales totalled $1.56 billion for the quarter, up from $1.46 billion in the same quarter last year.
Comparable store sales, a key metric for retailers, increased 4.7 per cent, while the average transaction was down2.2 per cent and traffic was up seven per cent, RBC analyst Irene Nattel pointed out.
She told investors in a note that the numbers reflect “solid demand as cautious consumers focus on core consumables and everyday essentials.”
Analysts have attributed such behaviour to interest rates that have been slow to drop and high prices of key consumer goods, which are weighing on household budgets.
To cope, many Canadians have spent more time seeking deals, trading down to more affordable brands and forgoing small luxuries they would treat themselves to in better economic times.
“When people feel squeezed, they tend to shy away from discretionary, focus on the basics,” Rossy said. “When people are feeling good about their wallet, they tend to be more lax about the basics and more willing to spend on discretionary.”
The current economic situation has drawn in not just the average Canadian looking to save a buck or two, but also wealthier consumers.
“When the entire economy is feeling slightly squeezed, we get more consumers who might not have to or want to shop at a Dollarama generally or who enjoy shopping at a Dollarama but have the luxury of not having to worry about the price in some other store that they happen to be standing in that has those goods,” Rossy said.
“Well, when times are tougher, they’ll consider the extra five minutes to go to the store next door.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
TORONTO – The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ordered TD Bank Group to pay US$28 million for repeatedly sharing inaccurate, negative information about its customers to consumer reporting companies.
The agency says TD has to pay US$7.76 million in total to tens of thousands of victims of its illegal actions, along with a US$20 million civil penalty.
It says TD shared information that contained systemic errors about credit card and bank deposit accounts to consumer reporting companies, which can include credit reports as well as screening reports for tenants and employees and other background checks.
CFPB director Rohit Chopra says in a statement that TD threatened the consumer reports of customers with fraudulent information then “barely lifted a finger to fix it,” and that regulators will need to “focus major attention” on TD Bank to change its course.
TD says in a statement it self-identified these issues and proactively worked to improve its practices, and that it is committed to delivering on its responsibilities to its customers.
The bank also faces scrutiny in the U.S. over its anti-money laundering program where it expects to pay more than US$3 billion in monetary penalties to resolve.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
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