– The Shorts Have Left The Building (ZeroHedge, Feb. 10, 2012):
Following the market’s “sudden” realization in December that the ECB had been quietly pumping $800 billion, or more than the entire QE2, into the market (sterilized? yeah right – when one lends out cash in exchange for worthless crap nobody else wants, and certainly not the Bundesbank, it is not sterilized), it became all too clear that the market’s response in 2012 would be a deja vu of 2011, if only for a while. Sure enough 2012 has been a tic-for-tic transposition of the market move in 2011. The only question is how far it would go, before, like back in 2011 again, it rolled over. To get a sense of one of the best indicators of an overextended rally, we go to the NYSE whose short interest update confirms that the rally, at least based on ongoing short squeeze dynamics (which as we said in mid-January has been the best strategy for a bizarro market) is now over. Sure enough, according to the latest data, short interest has collapsed from a multi-year high in September of 16 billion shorts, which coincided with the market lows, to essentially the lowest print seen in the past 4 years at 12.5 billion shares, a level which has not been breached once in the New Normal phase of market central planning. In other words, those who look at short interest and covering as a market inflection point, the time has come to take advantage of the short mauling, and bet on the market rolling over. That said, all it takes is for a central bank chairman somewhere to sneeze the wrong way, and this best laid plan will promptly collapse.
