[fishnguy]

Reuters: U.S. stock short-sellers notch $105 billion week in coronavirus sell-off

Investors targeting declines in U.S. stocks saw sizeable gains during last week’s sell-off, as markets plunged on concerns that the spread of the coronavirus was accelerating beyond China.

Short sellers - who hope to profit by selling borrowed shares and buying them back later at a lower price - logged a one-week paper profit of $104.77 billion in the last week of February, according to data from financial technology and analytics firm S3 Partners measuring bets against U.S.-listed stocks and American Depositary Receipts. That compares with $3.25 billion in paper profits in the prior week.

That upside came during a week marked by furious selling of everything from stocks to a broad range of currencies and eventually, some popular safe-haven assets like gold. All three major U.S. indexes registered their largest weekly declines since 2008, with the S&P 500 .SPX falling 11.5%.

The tumble in stocks has marked a long-awaited reversal for bearish investors, many of whom had seen their portfolios bruised by the market’ relentless march higher last year, when the S&P gained 29%. The S&P was up 2.7% on Monday.

Though few, if any, could have named the coronavirus as a major threat to markets going into 2020, short sellers have long railed against stock valuations they perceived as being out of line with fundamentals and other excesses that have cropped up during the more than decade-long bull market.

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