“They were really good stock pickers in this quarter,” said Dusaniwsky, pointing out solid trades in companies such as IBM Corp and Cloudflare Inc, which slid during the quarter.
Short sellers had a lucrative second quarter this year, managing to successfully bet against stocks even as the overall market continued to grind higher.
Short sellers, who borrow and then sell stocks in a bid to make money from price declines, amassed US$10 billion in second-quarter paper profits, according to data from S3 Partners LLC. Paper earnings from sectors such as industrials, health care and financials offset a US$15.7 billion mark-to-market loss in technology, said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3.
