S&P 500 snaps losing streak, buoyed by chip stocks

JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain with the skinny on retail trading activity through 11:30 a.m. ET today:

“Retail investors are selling into today’s strength in both ETFs and Single Stocks. In ETFs, they are trimming their broad-based exposure—a major departure from their typical pattern.”

SPDR S&P 500 ETF and ProShares UltraPro QQQ suffered particularly large outflows, per Jain.

The exceptions to the selling pressure are the Magnificent 7 stocks, he writes, with Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, and Microsoft enjoying “small net purchases” while Micron, TSMC, Exxon, and Chevron the most-dumped names.

Last week, Jain noted that retail traders had been “skipping the dips, selling into rallies, and positioning more defensively” with markets jittery amid the ongoing Mideast war.

Whatever traders are doing with Avis — buying, or just renting — it’s causing short sellers an immense amount of pain.

Shares of the car rental company have traded violently on Wednesday, from up nearly 7% at their highs to down almost 4% at their lows, after a face-ripping rally of 155% over the previous 11 sessions.

Per exchange data, roughly half the shares were sold short as of mid-March. S3 Partners, which tracks higher-frequency measures, said that short interest as a share of float had recently been trimmed to about 43%, down from as high as 53% at the start of the year.

Per Matthew Unterman, managing director at S3, Avis shorts are down $1.1 billion on paper over the past 30 days.

This isn’t Avis’ first rodeo: shares went parabolic in Q4 2021 as part of a meme stock moment in which it briefly became the most valuable company in the Russell 2000 small-cap index.

In any event, cheers to u/Bright_Leopard_4326, who admonished other members of the r/ShortSqueeze subreddit for not paying enough attention to the potential for a boom in the stock 10 days ago, when shares were trading below $150.