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