Exxon Mobil Short Interest Drops

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 21, 6:08PM EST

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January short interest in Exxon Mobil (XOM) dropped over 8 million shares in January to 50 million. Intuition might say it should go the other way. With the price of oil down from a peak of $78 last year to the $52 range, oil company profits are falling.

Chevron (CVX) and Conoco Phillips (COP) have already indicated that their Q4 06 numbers will not be spectacular and Thomson is estimating that oil company profits will drop between 7% and 37% in the quarter that just ended.

But, no every expert is convinced that oil will stay down. Commodities guru Jim Rogers still thinks oils is going to $100 a barrel, and soon. Car industry executives still think gas will go to $4 in the next decade.

One clue that Wall St. is reluctant to bet too heavily against Exxon is that its share price has not dropped very much. On a 52-week high/low of $79/$56.64, Exxon trades at $73.50.

It may be too soon to take the benefits of $50 oil to the bank.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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.