Shorts Backing Out of Major Tech (DELL, MSFT, YHOO, AAPL, AMZN, QCOM, GOOG, INTC, CSCO)

Investing

Published: August 12, 2008 1:36 pm

If you think the long-gone uptick rule or naked shorting was important for financial stocks, you might wonder what was going on in technology stocks with short sellers. In the major NASDAQ tech companies, there was a remarkable deterioration of the interest in short selling from just mid-July to late-July. Below is a list showing the decrease in the short interest with two exceptions at the end:

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) short interest dropped 5.8 million to 65 million
Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT) short interest fell 7.7 million to 55.8 million
Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) short interest dropped 7.1 million to 41 million
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) short interest fell over 3.5 million to 21.5 million
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) short interest dropped over 1.7 million to 32.1 million
Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) short interest fell 7.6 million to 25.9 million
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) short interest fell over 750,000 shares to 5.25 million

The two exceptions out of our major tech stocks were as follows:

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) short interest rose roughly 16 million shares to 106.3 million
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) short interest rose 800,000 shares to 69.2 million

Jon C. Ogg
August 12, 2008

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