UK Short Selling Activity and Firm Performance

Andrikopoulos, Panagiotis; Clunie, James; Siganos, Antonios

Abstract

We use short selling data from Data Explorers from 2004 to 2012 to investigate the extent to which UK short sellers are informed investors, in accordance with Diamond and Verrecchia's (1987) hypothesis. Our results suggest that heavily-shorted stocks fail to consistently underperform their lightly-shorted counterparts. Short sellers’ ability to predict firm performance is limited to firms that struggle for survival, such as firms about to enter bankruptcy or financial firms during the financial crisis. These results provide new evidence regarding the source of short-sellers’ information and should be of interest to academics, financial regulators and market participants.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jan 11, 2013
• Publication Date: 2012-11
• Deposit Date: Jul 6, 2021
• Journal: Journal of Business Finance & Accounting
• Print ISSN: 0306-686X
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 9-10
• Pages: 1403-1417
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jbfa.12003
• Keywords: short sellers, informed trading, financial crisis, bankrupt firms
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2785076