Volkswagen: The World's Largest Company?

On Tuesday,  Volkswagen (VLKAY.PK) briefly became the world’s largest company by market capitalisation as panic-buying by hedge funds desperate to cover losses caused its value to shoot up by up to €150bn.

Shares in Europe’s largest carmaker soared as high as €1,005 in early trading, having closed at about €210 on Friday. That gave it a market capitalisation of around €296bn ($369bn), higher than that of ExxonMobil (XOM), the oil company that closed on Monday with a value of $343bn (Source: FT.com).

You can see from this graph of VW's Market Capitalisation out on loan, (red line) versus the price (green line) that short investors have halved their positions in this stock over the last ten days, when the %MCOL decreased from 16% to 8.5% at close of business on Friday. We will update you with Monday's data, later today.

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