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Tesla Short Sellers Record $1 Billion Loss In Just 24 Hours

Tesla has had a brilliant start to the year 2021 after its stock (TSLA) closed at a record high of $729.77 yesterday, the official beginning of trading of 2021. And if this wasn’t good enough for the technology company, Monday then saw stock prices receive a 3.4% increase still to a 52-week high of $744.49.

While this is brilliant for longer-term stockholders who have been patient over the year, short-sellers are starting to squirm as the Financial Review already reports that shorts have lost $1 billion in 2021. That’s $1 billion in just 24 hours. Seeing signs of a repeat of 2020 where shorts lost $38 billion, we want to look into why something like this would happen.

Well so far it looks as though Tesla has reached its goal of selling 500,000 vehicles in 2020, despite the year’s reports showing only 499,650 deliveries in total. A more accurate number will become apparent after Tesla’s Q4 Earnings Call, currently in the calendar for later this month. Regardless of what the real figure may be, this number of deliveries is incredible for a car company that, like all others, was plagued with issues thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Fremont Factory in California was shut down, and being one of only four factories that builds Tesla models, this could have been detrimental to the firm.

Thankfully, CEO Elon Musk was able to put together a team of executives, engineers, sales advisors, and production associates to push the company through Q4 and achieve a staggering 180,000+ deliveries of which 179,000 of those cars were also produced.

“Musk & Co basically hitting its 500,000 goal for the year is a major feather in the cap for the company and the bulls as Tesla saw robust Model 3 demand over the last 10 months despite the hurricane-like consumer headwinds seen globally in this COVID backdrop,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote to investors.

Regardless of this, TSLA is one of the shortest stocks on Wall Street, with data from S3 showing short interest at $31.2 billion. This comes to 5.83% of TSLA’s float, in comparison to Apple, holding only $13.3 billion in shorts, which equates to only .6% of its float.

At the time of publication, TSLA is up 1.01% to $737.20.

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