Short View

The stock market last week suffered its hardest blow this year. In one day’s trading, sellers who were gloomy over the British devaluation and the threat of strikes drove the Dow-Jones industrial average down 3.38 points. But in the rest of the week, the market bounced right up again.

To bulls, all this was a sign of the market’s inherent strength. But there were plenty of bears around. Not in 17 years, in fact, has Wall Street been so full of them—if the number of short sales is any index’. The New York Stock Exchange reported that, as of Sept. 15, short sales had risen 127,581 shares in a month to a total of 2,133,700, the biggest since Aug. 4, 1932, when the total stood at 2,151,840. The bears were wrong then. Only a month before, the market had hit bottom, and was already on a five-year climb destined to total 153.18 points.