As Virgin Galactic gets swept up in GameStop mania, it gets back to flying

Enlarge / VMS Eve carries VSS Unity for its first captive-carry flight over Mojave. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

At a time when non-traditional investors are buying up heavily shorted stocks like GameStop and AMC Networks, the hunt is on to find other targets among the most-shorted stocks in the market.

Among those stocks is Virgin Galactic, which has a "short percent of float" of about 70 percent. This means that institutional traders have shorted about 70 percent of the shares of stock that are available for public trading. This is a big bet by investors that the company will fail.

In the year or so since it joined the New York Stock Exchange as SPCE, Virgin Galactic has typically traded between $15 and $25 a share. This last week it spiked to $58.65 and has remained comfortably above $40 since then in trading attributed to shorted stock-buying mania.

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