Nikola’s Penny Stock Short Interest

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Nikola’s Penny Stock Short Interest

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A penny stock is generally defined as one that trades for less than $5. Low emissions truck company Nikola has been one for a long time. Short sellers continue to bet the figure will go lower. Short interest in the stock is 34% of the shares outstanding. That is among the highest of all companies traded on U.S. exchanges.

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In the last three months, Nikola’s stock has dropped 50% to just above $3. Founder Trevor Milton was recently convicted of security fraud. A close look at the case shows it has nothing to do with the share price. Nikola’s financial figures have been the sole reason for the sell-off.

Nikola recently bought Romeo power, which manufactures EV batteries. This sort of horizontal integration will not improve Nikola’s situation. It is too late for that to happen.

Nikola will announce earnings in the upcoming week. There is no reason to believe they will be better than recent quarterly figures. It delivered 48 of its trucks. CEO Mark Russell commented, “Our momentum continued during the second quarter as we began delivering production vehicles to dealers and recognizing revenue from the sale of our Nikola Tre BEVs.” Fifty trucks are so small a number Nikola won’t last long enough to produce many more.

Nikola lost $173 million in the last quarter. For the first half of the year, the number was $325 million.

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It is obvious why short sellers have surged into the stock. It is equally obvious why they will make money.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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