Hedge funds are upping their bets against some of the biggest technology stocks.
Investors added $1.7 billion to short-selling positions on Monday and Tuesday, according to estimates from Ihor Dusaniwsky, S3 Partners' head of predictive analytics. The moves followed the biggest stock market plunge of the year on Monday.
Short selling is a term used to describe betting against shares of a company. Shorts saw mark-to-market profits of $16.7 billion over the period that began with an escalating trade war with China as well as other macroeconomic data.
Hundreds of millions of dollars over the last two days flowed into new bets. Hedge funds are expecting stocks such as Amazon, Google-parent Alphabet and Netflix to be among the biggest losers. All three tech giants rank among the top 10 with the largest short position increases.
Hedge funds that were ready for Monday's drop reaped the profits of betting against shares of multiple technology companies. Shorts against Apple brought in mark-to-market profits of just over $300 million in the last two days as the stock dropped 5.2%. Short positions also saw gains of $100 million or more each from declines in the stock of Netflix, Alibaba, Square, Tesla, Visa and Amazon.