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Investing

Short Sellers Savage Banks

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Short sellers appear ready to follow bank stocks all the way down to zero, at least based on data for the period that ended September 15.

Shares short in Citigroup (NYSE: C) rose 3% to 65.2 million. Short interest in Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) was up 23% to 75.7 million. Shares short in Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) rose by 5% to 222 million. General Electric (NYSE: GE), which in the opinion of many analysts has a large division not much different from a bank, saw an increase in shares sold short of 13% to 141.4 million. Even the shares short in widely regarded financial firm JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) were up by 7% to 56.4 million.

The short interest in General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) remained high as their sales have slowed and their negotiations with the UAW have picked up. Short interest in GM rose 13% to 51.6 million. Shares short in Ford were higher by 5% to 157.1 million.

Short sellers also kept large positions in tech stocks, although in some cases these did not rise. Shares sold short in Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) were down 8% to 141.8 million. Short interest in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) was up 15% to 102.8 million. Shares short in Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) rose 23% to 51.6 million. The short interest in Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) was up only 3% to 96.5 million.

Data comes from Nasdaq and NYSE.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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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