Short sellers are betting $768 million that Uber IPO will fall even further - but it could have been worse

Trista Kelley

May 15, 2019, 16:18 IST

Short sellers are betting $768 million that Uber IPO will fall even further - but it could have been worse

Shorts are circling Uber after piling into bearish bets of Lyft

Uber's shares have tumbled since its Friday IPO, and short sellers are betting the stock will fall further.
The fees to borrow Uber's shares - the method used for shorting them - falls somewhere around the 5% range. That's a relative bargain.
It's a sign short demand is lower than for other tech giants. Lyft after its IPO was the most expensive stock to short.

Traders are piling into $768 million worth of bets that Uber's stock will fall even further, after the ride-hailing giant posted the biggest first-day dollar loss in US IPO history.

Uber's shares have tumbled since the company listed them publicly on Friday. Market watchers have been awaiting data showing the first signs of short demand in the stock, especially after short sellers pounced on rival Lyft's IPO.

But it could have been worse. Initial data trickling in from analytics firms S3 Partners and IHS Market say that the fees to borrow Uber's shares - the method used for shorting them - falls somewhere around the 5% range.

That's a bargain, relatively speaking, and could be a signal that demand for short bets are lower than expected. Just look at Lyft's trading debut about six weeks earlier. For Lyft, the borrow fees reached a stunning 100% on the company's first day of trading, making it the most expensive stock to short on the whole index.

"It's much lower than day one for Lyft, or even for other large tech IPOs like Facebook," said Sam Pierson, an analyst at IHS Markit. Facebook was more expensive on day one, at a nearly 40% fee, and Twitter and Snap were in the "mid-teens," he said. (S3 calculated Uber's borrow fee at between 3% and 5%, while Markit found it at about 5% to 7%.)

About $768 million worth of Uber shares are being shorted - about 11.5% of the company's float, or 20.71 million Uber shares, S3 Partners said.

Uber's IPO came at a rocky time for financial markets. An escalation in Donald Trump's trade war with China sparked a fresh wave of volatility that jolted markets last week and weighed on sentiment.

Short sellers often circle newly public companies to pocket a profit during waning enthusiasm in a stock, especially well-hyped technology IPOs. For many debut share sales, short-selling ramps up over the first few weeks of trading. Uber will probably be no exception, says Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director at S3 Partners.

"We expect Uber short interest to increase over the next several days as short sellers continue to be active," he said in an email. "If short interest does continue to climb, we can expect short borrow rates to rise in lockstep and reach double-digit fees over the next day or two."

"As with most IPOs, the cost to borrow climbs steadily over the first week to two weeks until shares settle, and lending inventory replenishes," said Dusaniwsky. Demand for Lyft shares also settled over time. While Lyft's stock borrow rate was at 100% fee early on, within two weeks that fee fell to below 5%, he said.

Brokers are now able to approve short sales in size, Dusaniwsky said, meaning that if Uber's shares drift lower, "long shareholder sellers will now be ride-sharing with short sellers."