The Next GameStop? 15 Stocks With High Short Interest

Stocks with high short interest are back in focus. But beware: the music could stop at any moment.

short interest stocks
(Image credit: Getty Images)

The meme stock trading frenzy has suddenly sprung back to life, with shares in GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) blasting higher thanks to … well, let's call it speculative enthusiasm on social media.  

GameStop rose by nearly three-quarters in a single session after one of the biggest boosters of the first meme-stock frenzy returned to the internet trenches following a multi-year absence. Apparently, a cryptic post on X by Keith Gill, aka "Roaring Kitty," was all it took to once again set off squeezes in some heavily shorted names. 

Meme stocks tend to prompt consternation and confusion among normie market participants, but then that's just part of the fun. While it's technically true that meme stocks offer the remote possibility of earning penny-stock-like returns, they mostly seem to function as a source of nihilistic belly laughs for a select community of day traders.

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Either way, it appears the retail raiding hordes are back. They are piling into stocks with high short interest – in other words, companies where many shares are being used to bet against the stock – with the intention of setting off a short squeeze.

A quick primer: hedge funds and other market participants can bet against a stock by "shorting" it. But those bears sometimes get it wrong, and when they do, it can trigger an effect called a "short squeeze."

Stocks with high short interest

You can learn more about how short squeezes work in our explainer, but in brief, it's a phenomenon that occurs when buying pressure in a stock forces shorts to unwind their negative bets – which they can do only by purchasing the stock – fueling a virtuous cycle that sends shares aggressively higher.

To get a sense of where the next short squeeze candidate might come from, we've put together a table of the 15 stocks with the highest short interest by shares outstanding in the broad Russell 3000 Index, according to the latest data available from YCharts.

But first, a caveat: going long on a stock with high short interest thinking you're going to get rich off panic-buying by short sellers is an exceedingly dangerous idea. It's at least as risky as shorting stocks with high short interest in the first place.

When it comes to playing around with high short interest stocks, unless you are uncommonly lucky, let's just say the risks greatly outweigh the rewards.

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Stocks with the Highest Short Interest
CompanyTicker% of shares outstanding sold short
Beyond MeatBYND39.1
Biomea FusionBMEA38.9
Arbor Realty TrustABR38.5
CuteraCUTR37.6
Medical Properties TrustMPW37.0
Kohl'sKSS32.8
Sunnova EnergyNOVA32.3
Cassava SciencesSAVA32.1
NovavaxNVAX32.0
AltimmuneALT31.5
EVgoEVGO30.2
B. Riley FinancialRILY29.9
TrupanionTRUP29.5
iRobotIRBT29.3
MedifastMED28.5

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Dan Burrows
Senior Investing Writer, Kiplinger.com

Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the august publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of SmartMoney, MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, InvestorPlace and DailyFinance. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Consumer Reports, Senior Executive and Boston magazine, and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among other publications. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and hosted a weekly video segment on equities.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, funds, macroeconomics, demographics, real estate, cost of living indexes and more.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade stocks or other securities. Rather, he dollar-cost averages into cheap funds and index funds and holds them forever in tax-advantaged accounts.