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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marconi who wrote (9560)	6/2/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18691

Marconi, another factor that may be contributing to the historically high short interest is the various forms of arbitrage going on in the market these days compared to "history". Merger arbitrage effects huge quantities of shares, over 100 million shares of WCOM alone. In addition, you have brokerage houses and hedge funds involved in the widely discussed program trading (arbitraging the futures and cash markets) and in more complex strategies involving the options markets and individual stocks or baskets of them. With so many sector indexes now, and strategies based on fairly rapid movement of funds between sectors, I'd guess that arbitrage activities involving these same stocks are fairly large. At least by "historical" standards. Regards, Bob