Covered short of KITD

On October 8th I mentioned that I shorted KITD at $11.55. Today I finished covering it at $10.31 for a slightly better than 10% return. I tried to cover in the $9s a couple of weeks ago for a 15% return, but didn't get a fill - one of the challenges of shorting a low volume stock. Not exactly a home run, but not a bad return for a short position during this increasingly frothy cyclical bull rally.

I may decide to short KITD again, but in the meantime, I'll check the screener and message boards on ShortScreen and look for some more attractive short candidates.

New Short Position: KITD

In a post last year, I recommended a documentary from 2001 that was airing on Showtime again, Startup.com, which profiled the rise and fall of a dot-com called govWorks.com. A post on Fred Wilson's blog yesterday (NYC's BigApps Challenge) reminded me of one of the stars of Startup.com, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman (pictured above), the co-founder of govWorks.com. When I found through a quick Internet search that Tuzman was now the CEO of a public company (KIT digital Inc.; Nasdaq: KITD), I figured it might me a good candidate to sell short, so I ran the Altman Z"-Score on it. Its score was -4.17. Recall that a score below 1.1 indicates a high risk of bankruptcy. On the other hand, the financial data that score is based on doesn't take into account two recent acquisitions made by the company, which the company's management claims will be accretive, so bear that in mind.

I shorted this at $11.55 today.

The photo above of Mr. Tuzman is from KIT digital Inc.'s website.

Update: readers of this post may also be interested in this site, which offers tools and ideas for short sellers and includes an automated calculator and screener based on the Altman models: Shortscreen.com