Qualcomm

The weeklong rally from last week’s lows has taken a bite out of the $93.7 billion of mark-to-market profits, +11.12%, short sellers have earned since the beginning of October. Over the last week the S&P 500 index increased by 3.31%, the Nasdaq by 4.3% and the Russell 3000 by 3.23%. The S3 Blacklight platform tracks over 8,000 U.S. domestic equity shorts worth over $825 billion, which incurred mark-to-market losses of $23.3 billion, or -2.86%, over the last week.

Ihor Dusaniwsky, Author

The possibility of an economic slowdown has hit the technology sector hard, with the S&P 500 Information Technology Sector declining by 10% in the fourth quarter. Today’s poor reported results from both Nvidia (NVDA) and Applied Materials (AMD) pushed most of the companies in the Semiconductor and Semiconductor Equipment Sector into the red. Short sellers in the sector benefited to the tune of $824 million in mark-to-market profits, with the main winners being NVDA and AMD short sellers who are up $529 million and $162 million in mark-to-market profits, respectively.

Every week, S3 tracks short sellers’ equity positions in the US and Canada, revealing the trades that delivered positive results or missed the mark.  After tracking $953 billion worth of short positions, the following is a list of this week’s top five best and worst performing equity shorts.