Short Interest in T-Mobile Jumps 2.2 Million Shares

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 4:17AM EST · Published Aug 25, 8:20AM EDT

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Short Interest in T-Mobile Jumps 2.2 Million Shares — © Thinkstock

The short interest in T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) jumped nearly 2.2 million shares (12%) to around 20.2 million shares for the period that ended August 15. That figure is 7% of the total float.

T-Mobile is the darling of the smartphone industry. It posted 1.9 million customer “net adds” in the most recent quarter, impressive in a widely competitive industry. The dark side of that competition is the chance that price and data wars will begin to weigh on margins.

On August 19, 24/7 Wall St. pointed out:

T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) is supposed to be much better than Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), both in customer additions and financial performance. T-Mobile CEO and President John Legere, the most talkative chief executive in America, reminds the public of those things over and over again. He neglects to mention his share price. Since the start of the year, it is up 20% to Sprint’s 66%.

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T-Mobile was also hit by a bad grade in a widely admired piece of research from Rootmetrics:

T-Mobile’s relative national rankings in our testing across the United States were identical to what we found in both the first and second halves of 2015. We’ve noted before that T-Mobile typically performs much better in metro areas compared to state or national levels, and that was again the case in the first half of 2016. While T-Mobile didn’t win any United States RootScore Awards in this test period, the network narrowly trailed AT&T for third place in both our Data RootScore category and our Network Speed RootScore category.

In the nationwide ratings, Verizon’s score was 93.9, AT&T’s 89.9, Sprint’s 85.5 and T-Mobile’s 82.5.

To be fair, T-Mobile has scored better in other research, including the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Good or bad, some relatively large number of short sellers have placed bets against T-Mobile.

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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.