Short Sellers Flee Tech

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

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Short sellers who have bet against tech shares hit the exits during the period which ended on March 31. The short interest in the world’s largest chip company, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), dropped 3% to 56.7 million shares. Shares sold short in Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) dropped 13% to 54.6 million.

Shares short in graphics chip leader Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) dropped 17% to 23.1 million. The short interest in RF Microsystems (NASDAQ: RFMD) dropped 9% to 18 million. Shares short in Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) dropped 11% to 12.4 million shares. The short interest in Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) fell by 6% to 17.8 million.

Although there is no way to measure the real interest of short sellers, it may be that the proliferation of computers, tablets, and smartphones is great enough to cause Wall St. to believe that sales of many chip and infrastructure firms will rise.

Short interest among other widely traded stocks was mixed: Level 3 (NASDAQ: LVLT) off 4% to 89.4 million, Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) up 19% to 28.9 million, Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) down 14% to 94.4 million, AT&T (NYSE: T) up 10% to 56.8 million. and CBS (NYSE: CBS) up 90% to 21.1 million

Data from NYSE and NASDAQ.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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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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