Wall Street Journal’s influential Heard on the street column is reporting that the recent run up in the stocks of Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies and Ericsson might cause heartache for investors soon.

bq. Michael Mahoney, who runs the $100 million Communications & Technology Fund at EGM Capital LLC in San Francisco, sold his $4 million Nortel stake about two months ago. “We essentially made money on the company not going bankrupt,” he says. But to hold the shares, “we had to believe there was real growth.”

bq. Through mid-November, Lucent and Nortel were ranked No. 1 and No. 2 for the most “shorted” issues on the New York Stock Exchange, an indication of the number of investors who expect the share prices to decline.

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