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Investing

Short Sellers Exit Telecom Shares

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Short sellers pulled out of telecom stocks for the period ending on July 30, after many of them reported weak earnings. Investors are gambling that most of these shares are not likely to fall further.

The short interest in AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) dropped by 15% to 47.5 million. Beaten down shares in Nokia (NYSE: NOK) did not keep short sellers from dropping their negative bet by 14% to 57.6 million shares. Shares short in Frontier Communications (NYSE: FTR) dropped 12% to 45.1 million. The short interest in Motorola (NYSE: MOT) dropped 9% to 36.8 million. The short interest in Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) was down 11% to 24.5 million.

In the tech sector, the short interest in most stocks fell with the exception of faltering firms Qualcomm (NYSE: QCOM) and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Shares short in Qualcomm were higher by 20% to 31.1 million. The short interest in Nvidia was up 34% to 42.2 million.

Shares short in Microsoft Corporation (NYSE: MSFT) fell 9% to 85.2 million. The short interest in Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) fell 4% to 55.6 million. The short interest in Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) fell 2% to 41.6 million, and shares short in Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) dropped by 2% to 36.4 million.

Among other shares with large short positions, Sirius XM (NYSE: SIRI) dropped 4% to 208.6 million. The short interest in Level 3 (NASDAQ: LVLT) dropped 2% to 97.3 million. Shares short in Citigroup (NYSE: C) fell 2% to 438.9 million, the largest short position of any public company. Shares short on Ford Motor (NYSE: F) rose 3% to 281 million, and the short interest in Back of America (NYSE: BAC) rose 18% to 123.5 million.

Date from NYSE and NASDAQ.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

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.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

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.

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