Vietnamese electric car manufacturer VinFast, which has been operating at a loss, saw its stock price surge more than twice in the week since its listing in the United States. This surge pushed the company’s market value above that of Citigroup, prompting renowned short-seller Jim Chanos to exclaim, “crazy.”
However, profiting from shorting this stock is not straightforward. VinFast has only 1% of its shares (about 1.3 million shares) available for trading, leading to a lack of liquidity and high borrowing costs for short-sellers.
The scarcity of freely tradable shares also makes VinFast vulnerable to unpredictable fluctuations.
Tyler Manh Dung Nguyen, an analyst at Maybank, stated, “On the surface, shorting the stock might make sense, but we think it’s not the best trading strategy right now.”
Data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners shows that investors daring to short VinFast have accumulated nearly $1 million in paper losses.
