The Shorts Chase AT&T (T)(BLS)(TWX)(CMCSA)(VZ)
Maybe there was some concern in the market that the AT&T deal with BellSouth would get pushed back again. Maybe T’s run from $22 last November to its current $35 was simply too much. The concerns that cable companies like…
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Maybe there was some concern in the market that the AT&T deal with BellSouth would get pushed back again. Maybe T’s run from $22 last November to its current $35 was simply too much.
The concerns that cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are too far ahead in voice/broadband/digital TV can’t help. And, AT&T is running behind Verizon in terms of building fiber-to-the-home to compete with cable interests.
Whatever it was, the short interest in AT&T jumped 24.6 million shares to 159.5 million, the larest short interest on the NYSE in December.
If the BellSouth merger gets pushed out much longer, that short interest could grow.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.