Below is the short interest for major company stocks traded on the Nasdaq. The figures are from August 15 and compare to numbers from July 13, 2007.
Investors were not willing to bet on a consolidation among discount brokers with the short interest in Schwab and E*Trade rising. It appears they did believe that Whole Foods would complete its merger with Wild Oats, lowering short interest in WFMI.
Short interest in cable companies, especially Comcast and Charter fell, perhaps indicating a bottom for those stocks.
And, shorts moved out of Yahoo! indicating that many investors do not see its shares falling further.
Largest Short Positions
Level 3 (LVLT) 129.3 million shares short
Comcast (CMCSA) 113.2 million shares
Microsoft (MSFT) 97.2 million shares
Charter (CHTR) 94.5 million shares
Sirius (SIRI) 91.0 million shares
Intel (INTC) 84.0 million shares
Yahoo! (YHOO) 62.3 million shares
Cisco (CSCO) 57.5 million shares
Applied Materials (AMAT) 50.3 million shares
Oracle (ORCL) 46.3 million shares
Conexant (CNXT) 45.5 million shares
Symantec (SYMC) 42.9 million shares
Sun Microsystems (SUNW) 41.0 million shares
Largest Increase In Short Position
Expedia (EXPE) 9.2 million share increase
E*Trade (ETFC) 7.7 million share increase
ON Semi (ONNN) 6.8 million share increase
Ebay (EBAY) 5.5 million share increase
NetFlix (NFLX) 4.9 million share increase
Oracle (ORCL) 4.7 million share incrase
Schwab (SCHW) 3.4 million share increase
Tivo (TIVO) 3.1 million share increase
Largest Decreases In Short Interest
Whole Foods Market (WFMI) 9.3 million shares decrease
Charter 9.2 million share decrease
Opsware (OPSW) 8.9 million share decrease
Yahoo! 8.5 million share decrease
Dell (DELL) 8.4 million share decrease
Applied Materials 8.2 million share decrease
Crocs (CROX) 8.0 million share decrease
Comcast 6.6 million share decrease
Data from NASD and WSJ
Douglas A. McIntyre
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