The presence of short-sellers is a widely reported metric, with the most heavily short-sold companies sometimes experiencing drastic plunges in share price.
In our regular looks at the ASX's most shorted companies, I also come across companies with trifling amounts of short interest. Here are 10 of the least short-sold shares on the ASX:
Aspen Group Limited (ASX: APZ) – 1 share short-sold
Afterpay Touch Limited (ASX: APT) (AFTERPAY T FPO on Google Finance) – 999 shares short-sold
Class Ltd (ASX: CL1) – 1,083 shares short-sold
Dicker Data Ltd (ASX: DDR) – 1,989 shares short-sold
Integral Diagnostics Ltd (ASX: IDX) – 1 share short-sold
IVE Group Ltd (ASX: IGL) – 56 shares short-sold
Lovisa Holdings Ltd (ASX: LOV) – 1,400 shares short-sold
RXP Services Ltd (ASX: RXP) – 303 shares short-sold
Vanguard Australian Shares High Yield ETF (ASX: VHY) – 5 units short-sold
WAM Leaders Ltd (ASX: WLE) – 310 shares short-sold
This data is a few days old and is not necessarily correct, as it depends on sellers making reports to ASIC. The figures above are generally quite tiny, less than $1000 in many cases.
However, it is interesting to note that some companies that might have stronger short interest do not, while some unusual targets that you wouldn't expect to be short-sold, are. WAM Leaders and the Vanguard High Yield ETF could be targets for Australian economy bears, given that these companies hold meaningful amounts of bank and infrastructure shares.
It is also surprising to see that Lovisa doesn't have greater short interest, given the apparent low barriers to entry and low price of the company's products. I expect that Afterpay Touch could also see increasing interest from short-sellers over time, especially as more data is collected about the performance of borrowers using the Afterpay system.
