To: Anaxagoras who wrote (857 ) 2/16/1999 9:06:00 PM From: Platter Respond to
From Briefing.com....(DAYTRADER): The analysts at Briefing.com can not remember a more difficult time to be a short-seller. The biggest headache shorts have faced has been the inability to borrow shares from their brokers. Over the past several months, a number of major firms have prevented clients from shorting many of the most volatile Internet names by claiming that there was no paper available to be borrowed. However, in most cases, the short interest in these stocks has been on the decline, while the float has increased substantially (as company insiders have sold into rallies). Based on these two factors, alone, availability of these stocks should be greater than at any point in recent memory. Firms also making life difficult for shorts by raising maintenance requirements, reducing investors' ability to wait out rallies in the stocks. Most frustrating of the recent developments in the short-seller's universe has been the complete abandonment of fundamental analysis by investors. This trend is particularly evident in the Internet arena, where investors perceive any news, outside of a bankruptcy filing, as a positive. Take shares of Egghead.com (EGGS) for example. The stock jumped 19% this morning after company announced it would become a premier computer software merchant on Microsoft's MSN Shopping. Sure, EGGS did not spell out that it would have to pay big bucks to be affiliated with MSN, but anyone with a modicum of common sense could have come to that conclusion on their own. The rally in EGGS shares today tells management that it can spend as much money as it wishes without revealing the amount, as long as the dollars are being paid out to a company with a household name. Moreover, the action serves as another warning to short-sellers that the old rules of shorting stocks simply don't apply anymore. Sure, these stocks will eventually break. But by the time the momentum in Internet stocks completely reverses to the downside, short-sellers may either be too broke or gun shy to participate.
