Eve carries VSS Unit for its maiden flight in captivity over Mojave. “/>Virgin Galactic
At a time when non-traditional investors are buying up high short stocks like GameStop and AMC Networks, the hunt for other targets of the most shorted stocks in the market is underway.
Among those stocks is Virgin Galactic, which has a “short percentage or float” of about 70 percent. This means that institutional traders have shorted about 70 percent of the stocks available for public trading. This is a big bet from investors that the business will fail.
In the year or so since joining the New York Stock Exchange as SPCE, Virgin Galactic typically traded between $ 15 and $ 25 a share. It peaked as high as $ 58.65 last week and has remained comfortably above $ 40 in trading ever since, attributed to a stock buying short.
Virgin Galactic – which is developing a series of spaceplanes to transport tourists on short sub-orbital flights of more than 50 miles – stands out among the list of most short-circuited stocks. Most of these businesses, such as GameStop, Bed Bath & Beyond, and The Children’s Place, are long-standing brick-and-mortar businesses ravaged by online shopping, the pandemic, and other forces affecting profits.
Virgin Galactic, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the stock market, developing a futuristic service. The company remains far from profitable and is still struggling to get its first space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, in commercial service. His best years, in terms of profitability, are years in the future, if they ever come at all. It often requires flying missions to the edge of space, perhaps weekly.
Virgin Galactic’s recent stock spike comes as the company finally resumes its powered flight program. In mid-December, nearly two full years after the last powered space flight, Virgin Galactic tried its streamlined SpaceShipTwo spaceplane on its third suborbital flight over 80 km.
However, shortly after the spaceplane was released from its carrier, named Two white knight, the firing sequence to ignite the spaceplane engine has not been completed. As a result, the rocket engine failed to fire, and the two pilots on board glided the vehicle safely back to a New Mexico runway instead of hovering above the atmosphere. The company then began to investigate this malfunction of the on-board computer, which halted the ignition of the rocket engine, and began to take action to address it.
Prior to December’s test flight, Virgin Galactic had set up a fairly rigorous schedule, which would include another suborbital flight with four mission specialists operating within the SpaceShipTwo booth to ensure it is ready for commercial operations. This would be followed by a final test flight with Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson in the first quarter of 2021. After this point, the company planned to start flying commercial missions with paying customers.
On Monday, Virgin Galactic said the next test flight is now scheduled for a flight window opening Feb. 13. This test flight will test the repair work carried out since the December 12 flight and evaluate the new interior cabin, which has been upgraded. for passengers. The results of this test flight “will inform the next steps in the test flight program,” the company said. Commercial missions are therefore unlikely before at least the second half of this year.