Shorts will win on betting against SuncorEveryone knows that the street has hundreds of millions of SU shares to sell because of ESG. Everyone knows that SU mgmt is weak and they don't have any skin in the game.
Unlike ENB, SU has not facilitated the transition of institutional sellers, instead hiding their heads in the sands and picking up the scraps.
The rules on shorting in Canada may as well not even exist because they are not enforced.
The sophisticated American shorters know they can prey upon Canadian based companies like Suncor that have huge floats, lots of liquidity, and weak management. There is a reason that CNQ is almost double the price of Suncor.
IPL is a perfect example of the shorts winning big time, IPL got themselves in a pickle by having too much debt and creating a modified DRIP which allowed the shorts to eat their lunch. The shorts drove the IPL share price down from $20 to $6 per share in a hurry. We all know how that played out as the company is now owned by the Brascan guys.
If management doesn't address the situation, the Shorts will continue to control Suncor until a whale comes along and swallows Suncor, much like Brookfield swallowed IPL. Don't think that the much larger scale of Suncor vs IPL will make a difference because there are lots of companies that could swallow Suncor.
So what do you do as a SU investor?
As painful as it might be, waiting it out will probably provide a nice payoff. Anyone that sold IPL below $10 is now kicking themselves as IPL got back to pre-pandemic prices on the takeover. The value is there in Suncor and somebody will realize it and take advantage. If SU's mgmt doesn't take their heads out of their butts, it is going to take awile for current shareholders to be rewarded.
There is simply no other reasonable explanation.