Short interests: tips, trends, observations

Peachy in Georgia

Abby Joseph Cohen, the head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s investment policy committee, is considerably more welcome in Atlanta than either William T. Sherman or the New York Yankees. Ms. Cohen, the Chipper Jones of investment strategists, has spoken in Atlanta for the past three autumns, and, said a Goldman salesman in introducing her this year, each time the market has risen by more than 20% within six months.

Even the ever-upbeat Ms. Cohen didn’t want to have to fulfill that kind of promise. She said that although the economy will continue to improve in 2000, there’s not nearly as much room for improvement as there used to be.

Light dawns on empire

The day trading blight has reached Old Blighty.

Howard Davies, Britain’s meanest financial junk yard dog (he’s chairman of top regulator Financial Services Authority), warned Her Majesty’s subjects that 70% of day traders under the Stars and Stripes lose money. Internet trading is growing even more rapidly than Lucas electrical systems deteriorated in British sports cars of the ’50s and ’60s: Volume grew from 29,000 trades in the first quarter to 51,000 in the second.

He also told an industry group that Internet chat rooms often harbor charlatans talking up the price of worthless stock so they can make a killing.

American history becomes British current events.

On the road again

TheStreet.com. is about as busy as Interstate 80 at rush hour.

The online financial news site co-founded by ubiquitous mouth James J. Cramer is joining mouses with the New York Times to squeak out a joint newsroom. Stories will appear free, if you ignore the ads, on both outfits’ websites and be updated throughout the day. Running the operation will be Times assistant business editor Jack Lynch.

Thomas Clark, who replaced the suddenly departed Kevin English as TheStreet’s top traffic cop, pardon, chief exec, just a couple of weeks ago, said “With our larger free front porch, we now offer even more coverage of breaking financial news.” He didn’t mention the increasingly flabby Times’s big bay window.

At the same time, TheStreet is on a drive to pick up institutional accounts for its news service, reports sister publication Crain’s New York Business. With 94,000 — mostly amateur — subscribers and 75 reporters and editors loafing around all day, TheStreet’s smarties believe their boulevard can be a cheap and accurate alternative avenue to the charts and analytics provided by Bloomberg News and Reuters PLC for thousands of dollars a month.

The Cramer target market is small and midsize money managers and the big spender who’s looking for some icing on his cake. In other words, people who never look at the New York Times website.