International Index Explorer

The growth in 130:30 strategies and the move towards high conviction active fund management means that you can no longer ignore the short interest in any company.

• Locating stock to cover short positions is now just part of the picture. As more players enter the shorting market, overcrowded short positions have thrown up new demands. A successful short has always required:
• Early access to available stock
• Minimum recall risk
• Stable stock borrow rate
• Secrecy surrounding the position.

But aggressive competition has led to further refining of shorting skills to include:

• Instant access to stock borrowing flow data
• Proprietary understanding of how much stock could realistically be borrowed
• Ongoing insight into how crowded your short position is becoming
• Independent, non-transactional access to this information.

For most of our clients, fundamental research flags up potential stocks to short and accurate short interest data helps time the entry and exit of the trade. Data can be downloaded to an SFTP site on a daily basis, or accessed by GUI on our secure website.

Key Features

• Short interest is calculated using stock lending/borrowing trading data.
• Data is refreshed at 4am GMT and runs on a rolling 1 day delay
• Both Equities and Bonds are covered (inc ETFs and Depositary Receipts)
• Historic data is viewable over at least 2 years
• Data takes account of over 65% of global short sales 150,000 securities across over 300 asset classes and sectors
• 20,000 funds send us their borrowing positions daily (normally via their Custodian). This allows us to strip out noise caused by dividend arbitrage.

Application “Information is power”…A fundamental or bottom up approach to picking stocks needs to know if the weight of short interest could affect the likely direction of the share price. Short term trading strategies can leverage this info to their advantage. Risk policies can be augmented by setting barriers to prevent shorting when a certain proportion of the market is already positioned this way. Portfolio construction can use this information to improve hedging techniques. As the press recently pointed out, most funds still have high beta to the markets. Our data shows that shorting iShares and Exchange Traded Funds is still where the herd applies defensive shorts.

Types of user:

• Securities Financing professionals
• Portfolio Managers
• Research Analysts
• Traders
• Prop Desks
• Corporate Brokers
• Corporates

For further information, please contact Alexander Hofmann via the About page.