Where have all the shorts gone?

Wed, 21 May 2008 06:59:54 -0400

When Douglas Kass, in an interview with Barron's, calls short sellers "an endangered species, like the dodo bird," you have to draw a distinction. He's talking about short sellers who do nothing else. The number of short-only funds indeed has dwindled since the heyday of the Feshbach Brothers and others, but now it seems there are more shorts than ever. It's just that most of the shorting is coming from long-short type funds. Indeed, 130/30 funds are all the rage. It makes sense to do both. As for Kass' new partners, he's faring well, proving himself to be anything but a dodo. His Seabreeze Partners short fund has generated a 16.5 percent gain vs. a 5.6 percent loss for the S&P 500, according to Barron's.

For more:
- here's the Barron's article via MarketWatch