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Investing

Crazy Short Sellers in Online Advertisers (May 2007) (VCLK, AQNT, TFSM)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Stock Tickers: VCLK, AQNT, TFSM

We have frequently noted how the short sellers are often motivated by different factors and have a longer-term outlook than Joe Q. Public.  We wanted to look at the few remaining Internet advertisers that hadn’t been acquired, and it’s official: short sellers in these names are either crazy or just stupid.  There were dozens and dozens of reports that the sector was in play after Google gobbled up DoubleClick, so being short those names was just ignorant.  It isn’t like they all went up in shares short, but the degree to which the shorts were still there just seems weird.  Short sellers are a different breed, that’s for sure.  This could have been titled "Online Advertisers: Short Sellers Kicked in the Shorts."

Stock (Ticker)                        MAY       APRIL  CHANGE
aQuantive (AQNT)               9.56M    8.47M    12.9%
24/7 Real Media (TFSM)    6.73M    7.08M    -4.9%
ValueClick (VCLK)              9.66M    9.95M    -2.9%

Jon C. Ogg
May 25, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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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