Pump and Dumps are disappearing before our eyes as dumb daytraders go bankrupt. The easy game in town is no longer playing, with the NASDAQ looking more and more broken. So how do the short sellers make money now? Go after gators? First of all, let me define what a gator is. It is generally a high growth tech stock with a strong growth fund following with a huge P/E or no earnings and usually between $1+ billion (TLGD) up to $70 billion (JNPR). They are usually very dangerous and hazardous to a shorter's wealth. Should we be pounding away at dotcom life support stocks? The internet has turned into one big sell fest, and some are actually attractive buys as this level.

The NASDAQ market is taking no prisoners when it comes to internet stocks, as can be seen by the stunning YHOO reversal in AH and the continued butchering over the past few days. YHOO is actually a good representation of what happens when a stock goes from being a high growth stock to internet staple to maturing slower growth company. People are willing to pay almost anything for high growth. For an internet staple, a bit less. For a maturing slow grower, much less. YHOO essentially went from internet staple to maturing slower growth company in a span of 2 days right after earnings. A lot of money could have been made shorting YHOO during this transition. But, there was definitely a bit of uncertainty as to how they would report since YHOO had always given a strong outlook. It was probably a good signal that DCLK could have been shorted pre-earnings as well, due to its business correlating highly with YHOO's. Unfortunately, the chart was already beat up before they reported, only turning uglier after the earnings announcement.

Now where do us vultures turn for the next meal? That's been on my mind all this week as I look at the barren landscape. Pump and dumps are out of the question since they hardly exist. Gators are risky. It is probably too late to short most internet stocks. Although a stock like VRSN still has a lot of meat left. AMZN is eventually going to go much lower. There is nothing really easy right now, despite all this volatility. It makes it frustrating, especially since lots of stocks are going down. The amateur shorters are probably making more than the professional shorts since they were willing to go after the YHOOs and the DCLKs while many of the professionals were waiting for a fat pitch.

The NASDAQ has already lost 20% and we're coming up on a seasonally strong period for the markets, the Nov-Jan period. So should we be going long here? I have always been against owning stocks except for a trade, so I don't think that works unless there is a bigger selloff leading to much lower prices. The Friday rally didn't help. The best stocks to go long during an April like selloff would be high beta technology stocks like a JNPR, RBAK, ITWO, ARBA, etc. I am poring over the 5 day charts to see which stocks did best on Monday and Friday, the 2 best days to be long this week. They are probably the best dip buying candidates. From a preliminary look, the usual high growth suspects showed up on the scan. JNPR et al.