Home Depot And Lowe’s Pick Up Larger Short Interest

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 22, 10:01AM EDT

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The August short interest numbers show that Home Depot (HD) and Lowe’s (LOW) had spikes in shares sold short. At HD that number hit 61.8 million, up 20.8 million. At LOW the figure rose 6.5 million to 43.7 million.

The rise indicates that, even with the stocks beaten down, some on Wall St. believe that the housing and mortgage mess will get worse and drag the two retailers down further.

Over the last month HD is down 12% to $34.45, fairly near its 52-week low. Poor earnings and concerns that a deal to sell it wholesale operation have hurt the share price. A fair number of investors may believe that the sale of the HD Supply unit to private equity interests could be killed by the current credit market environment.

Over at Lowe’s shareholder are more sanguine. The stock was upgraded by JP Morgan and UBS. Analysts figure that LOW will take market share from its larger rival. Shares are up 2.5% to $29.65 on the news.

But, there are a number of folks who don’t buy into a turnaround at Lowe’s. Perhaps they believe that market share will not help if the market shrinks enough.

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.