To Alex and to All: Alex is exactly right. The float may not even be 4.4 million because the parent company of The Twentieth Century Fund bought 8% (or about 561,000 shares) in mid-February. (To further make matters interesting, some of those shares were bought for US Robotics at a time 3Com was acquiring USR.)The stock is being shorted because it's so thinly traded it's easy to manipulate. A manipulator (read "broker")can easily trade the 50,000 shares (on a usual day) needed to brake any rally that may threaten its short interest. On a heavily-traded day (250,000 shares) all it takes is a 100,000 shares to break the back of a rally. (If things get really bad for our not-so-hypothetical broker, it can always get Jensen to issue another uninformed down-grade.)
The only reason the stock has gone up in the last week is some "short" probably went "long" in anticipation of good earnings.
But if RSYS is in the dire shape the "shorts" would like you to think it's in, how come Intel still owns about 20% of the outstanding stock, Techtronics 12.5%, and the Twentieth Century Fund 8%? (And, by the way, why didn't the President of the company unload the remaining 246,000 shares he still owns when the stock was in the 50s and 60s?) |
