Price Movements around Short Covering Trades

Abstract

Using reported large short position data from Korea stock market, we studied stock price movements around the short covering trades. We found a significant negative relationship between the short covering trades and the stock return on the previous five trading days. trading days. It means that short sellers engage in contrarian trading when they cover short positions. Short coverings are associated with positive returns on the trading day, confirming that there is a positive transient price impact at the coverings of large short positions. We also found that stock prices decline steadily in the 60 trading days following short coverings. This indicates that some short sellers are forced to prematurely close out their positions, thus suffering opportunity losses. Particularly, when a sudden surge in stock prices causes involuntary large-scale short coverings to occur in the short squeeze, the price impact gets larger and short sellers bear greater opportunity losses. This study sheds light on short selling strategies in practice and market stabilizing policies. Key words: Short Covering; Contrarian; Price Impact; Timing Ability; Short Squeeze JEL Classification: G10, G14