Short Sellers Keep Attacking SIRIUS XM, All The Way Up (SIRI)

SIRIUS XM Radio Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI) is one cult stock that has been more than puzzling.  Literally about twelve hours after we issued our own outlook for what will happen now that $2.00 was hit, we saw an analyst downgrade from Lazard.  Now we see that the new short interest reading came in with yet another gain.

The short interest as of the April 15, 2011 settlement date hit a reading of 270.264 million shares.  This is close to a 2% gain from the reading of 265.453 million at the end of March. What is more important than anything is that this is the highest short interest in over a year.

After looking deeper into the history, the short interest has now been above 200 million shares at every report since the end of October 2010. The lowest short interest reading of the entire last 52-week was 131.6 million shares in mid-April of 2010.

The only saving grace is that the days-to-cover ratio is a tad smaller than the prior reading: 5.487 versus 5.809 days worth of volume.  In the last year there have been two readings where the days-to-cover came in above 6.0.

SIRIUS XM shares are flat at $1.98 this morning on what looks and feels like anemic trading volume.  Keep in mind that the 52-week trading range is $0.86 to $2.00.

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JON C. OGG