JC Penney Short Interest Slips to 81 Million Shares

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 5:47AM EST · Published Jul 13, 8:40AM EDT

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JC Penney Short Interest Slips to 81 Million Shares — © courtesy of J.C. Penney Co. Inc.

J.C. Penney Co. Inc.’s (NYSE: JCP) prospects may be slightly better than those of Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) and Sears Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: SHLD). However the short interest in its shares stood at 81.9 million, which is 27% of its float, as of the 15-day period that ended on June 30.

Macy’s prospects are so poor that its chief executive officer is leaving. Sears continues to lose huge amounts of money and serially close locations. J.C. Penney trades at the lower end of its 52-week range at $8.60, on a high and low of $11.99 and $6, respectively.

J.C. Penney recently missed revenue forecasts, coming in at $2.81 billion in the most recently reported quarter. However, CEO Marvin Ellison affirmed his company’s full year guidance. He is one of the few retail executives to do so. Unlike many retailers, he has not decided to shutter a large number of locations.

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The primary knock on J.C. Penney is that, like for all other retailers, it lives in a shadow cast by Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). Amazon’s recent Prime day was described as a success, despite the attempts by other retailers to steal its customers.

As J.C. Penney released its most recent quarterly results, Ellison said:

The first quarter was clearly challenging from a sales perspective. Although our business was not immune to the issues facing other retailers, I am pleased that we were able to deliver our second consecutive quarter of positive operating profit. In addition, the teams did an excellent job of proactively managing the business throughout the quarter to ensure we remained a fiscally disciplined organization. As a result, we exceeded our profitability expectations, achieving a 63 % increase in EBITDA to $176 million for the quarter.

That is a very tiny number when compared to the company’s revenue for the same period.

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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.