Investors in AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. have long tried to draw attention to the possibility of illegal naked short selling in the company’s shares. One common sign of naked short selling is “fails to deliver,” or trades that are not closed out.
So I found it interesting that AMC has fails-to-deliver 35,000 times as large as those of Amazon, one of the largest stocks in the market, based on the latest SEC data.
Fails to deliver can happen for a variety of reasons, some of them benign. But they can also happen when a trader sells short shares he doesn’t own, also known as naked short selling. The shares aren’t delivered because they never existed.
The example with Amazon may be particularly dramatic, but AMC’s fails to deliver are still about 9 times the size of Apple’s, whose market cap is 150 times greater than little old AMC’s.
Here is the raw data from the SEC’s latest report. The number right before the company name is the fails to deliver:
20210701|00165C104|AMC|3519354|AMC ENTMT HLDGS INC CL A COM S|56.68
20210701|023135106|AMZN|100|AMAZON COM INC;COM USD0.01|3440.16
20210701|037833100|AAPL|406167|APPLE INC;COM NPV|136.96
This is nothing new for AMC. Indeed, it has had so many fails to deliver for such a long time that it has repeatedly featured on a special “threshold list” maintained by the NYSE.
It seems highly likely to me that something fishy is going on here. But will the SEC act?
More on AMC:
AMC ON THE THRESHOLD LIST: STRONG EVIDENCE OF NAKED SHORT SELLING
EXPLOSIVE CLAIMS IN LAWSUIT AGAINST ROBINHOOD
SHORT SELLERS LOSE $44 BILLION IN 30 DAYS
Photo: “nothing to see here” by misterbisson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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