LANV borrow fee 626%

LANV short interest to free float as of June 14th: 0.43%.
LANV short interest to shares outstanding as of June 14th: 0.10%.

Why is the borrow fee so high?

One explanation could be that the short interest has exploded since June 14th, but it seems unlikely?

I bought some shares just to see if they would be loaned out. They did not. If the borrow fee is so high, wouldn't you expect the shares to be loaned out immediately?

 

That is strange.

LANV is an ultra-dead stock.
It will stay around $5 to $6 for the next few days/weeks/months/years ...
Professional traders are definitely not interested to short LANV.

 

One could consider buying the stock and earning borrow fees (if hopefully they get lend out). IBKR forwards you 50% of the interest.

 

In the US can you deduct losses from stocks in borrow fee income?

 

I never understand how the borrow fee is determined. The share holder asks for it? But I doubt it since share holder does not have a choice to determine the fee.

 

it is part of pnl. You do not pay tax on individual stock pnl.

 

The broker determines the borrow fee. He either gets the stock from other accounts or borrows it from other institutions.
Here you can look up the highest stock borrow fees for IB: https://iborrowdesk.com/
The thing is you don't know how often or how long it is going to be lent out so could be earning nothing.
The typical way to capture the stock borrow fee is through single stock futures. Still possible in europe. In the US the only SSF exchange closed. So the only way is through swaps which makes it more difficult to access if you don't have institutional infrastructure.
Another way would be to buy the stock, lend it out and synthetically create a short position with options. If you can lend it out at a higher rate than the option implied borrow rate than you make money. With this approach you would need lending infrastructure again...Attached is a nice article that explains it well.

 

"I bought some shares just to see if they would be loaned out. They did not. If the borrow fee is so high, wouldn't you expect the shares to be loaned out immediately?"

Someone(s) is running an arb which they believe will exceed the SSR rebate rate. You can observe it as what appeared to be overpriced puts. Most simple option models will just show those puts as pumped volatility - which it is not. You actually have two different rates for the put and call. They have warrants.