Starbucks New Problem: Growing Short Interest

Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ:SBUX) shareholders have a new worry to add to the list -- growing short interest. Last month Starbucks landed in the top 5 biggest increases in short interest of stocks traded on the NASDAQ, congratulations to the 25% jump!  The trade has been placed, now its time to watch what happens next.

The data is in from FACTBOX, here are April's winners for largest short increase and guess who takes the crown for largest short increase?  You guessed it:

The latest date is as of April 30, while the previous period's data is as of April 15.
COMPANY                   APRIL 30      APRIL 15      NET CHANGE  PCT CHANGE
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FIVE BIGGEST INCREASES:
Starbucks Corp (SBUX)     37,934,224     30,311,129    7,623,095    25.2%
Yahoo! Inc (YHOO)         43,016,246     37,519,485    5,496,761    14.7%
Fifth Third (FITB)        61,455,638     56,301,021    5,154,617     9.2%
Dell Inc (DELL)           41,242,281     36,188,716    5,053,565    14.0%
Intel Corp (INTC)         85,570,732     80,535,046

To add to the fun, Moody's just downgraded Starbucks' $550 million senior unsecured notes to Baa3 from Baa2. In addition, Moody's lowered the company's short-term commercial paper rating to Prime-3 from Prime-2. The outlook is stable. This concludes Moody's review initiated on January 29, 2009.

Senior Analyst Bill Fahy said, "The downgrade reflects management's challenge of refocusing the business without significantly damaging the Starbucks brand, as well as weaker than anticipated operating performance that has resulted in debt protection measures that are more representative of a Baa3 senior unsecured rating."

Starbucks responded the Moody's downgrade saying, "Starbucks remains in a very solid financial position."  More from SBUX's response.

Lastest data from ShortSqueeze.com on Starbucks: