VICI volume spiked on January 13, 2023 – TRS added another 30% of short liquidity

VICI Properties Inc. (VICI) has a daily average trading volume of 6.4 million shares. At around $32.69/share, that’s an average volume of $210 million. On Friday, January 13, 2023 that volume went to $691 million. The reason was a corporate action: VICI Properties Inc. Announces Public Offering of Common Stock. Pretty straight-forward.

But Total Return Swaps trading in VICI spiked on January 13 too, with a short position of $207 million put into place. This was 30% of the single day’s volume in the cash markets and the same liquidity as if an entire day’s worth of average trading in VICI was layered on top of existing volume. Since the TRS trade occurred in the swaps market, we can only presume that part of the liquidity spike in the cash markets was dealer hedging.

The short TRS position holder was able to get their liquidity without moving the market. Since this was a big trade relatively speaking, that could have mattered a lot. In the securities lending market, VICI went special for January 13th only then rebounded to its usual spot at as a General Collateral stock.

This would have worked as a one day trade. VICI’s stock price fell from $34.02/share on January 12 to $33.15 on January 13, a 2.6% drop.

Here’s VICI’s stock price and trading volume for the first part of January 2023. The red and green bars at the bottom are millions of shares traded; red shows that the stock price went down for the day.