Todd over at ValuePlays did a great job analyzing the short interest in Sears Holdings. Given my concentrated position in SHLD, I follow the company pretty closely. I even started doing my own analysis on the naked short selling of SHLD shares just to see how bad it really is. Check out the numbers below.

Also, from the 10-Qs and 10-K:

During the 13- and 26- week periods ended August 2, 2008, we repurchased 5.6 million and 6.0 million of our common shares at a total cost of $437 million and $477 million, respectively, under our share repurchase program. Our repurchases for the 13- and 26- week periods ended August 2, 2008 were made at average prices of $78.22 and $79.34 per share, respectively. As of August 2, 2008, we had $206 million of remaining authorization under our common share repurchase program. The share repurchase program, authorized by our Board of Directors, has no stated expiration date and share repurchases may be implemented using a variety of methods, which may include open market purchases, privately negotiated transactions, block trades, accelerated share repurchase transactions, the purchase of call options, the sale of put options or otherwise, or by any combination of such methods.

Go take a look at SHLD’s options chains. Keep an eye on months with unusually high deep in the money contracts.

Sept 08, Dec 09 and Jan 09 options each have several thousand contracts that will be called. Im pretty sure the value guys arent writing covered calls.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Bruce Berkowitz, Richard Perry, Sears Holdings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.