What do Sirius XM, Herbalife, and Iconix all have in common?

They are all both loved and hated by the Street.

All three stocks are at or near multi-year highs. Sirius is up 56% in the last year, while Herbalife has jumped 48% and Iconix has posted the best performance of the lot – with an astounding 73% gain. And yet despite those performances, or perhaps because of it, investors continue to bet against those stocks by shorting them. Short interest – that is to say, the number of bets that a stock will fall – runs high in all three stocks. 9% of tradable Sirius shares are sold short. For Iconix, it’s almost 17%. Herbalife? 40%.

(Watch: Buying back Herbalife?)

Call it a case of being so bad, they’re actually good.

A little context here: when investors go short, they are hoping to profit from a stock decline by selling borrowed shares and then buying them back later for less money. Shorting is profitable when stocks fall, but it can be painful when they rise. If you short a stock at

Legendary technical analyst John Bollinger uses his invention – Bollinger Bands – to analyze a stock he thinks is a buy.

There’s an extremely popular tool technical analysts often use to spot trends with stocks: Bollinger Bands.

In celebration of Talking Numbers’ Chart Week, we have the inventor himself – John Bollinger – on to explain how they work. And, he even brought an example to show why he thinks one stock is ready to break out on the upside.

(Read: The Ultimate Federal Reserve QE Taper Live Blog)

To be sure, Bollinger Bands are not easy to calculate by hand but most major stock charts, such as those on Yahoo! Finance, include them. (For a detailed discussion on the math behind Bollinger Bands, visit BollingerBands.com’s very in-depth tutorial here.)

But, for the unversed, here’s how John Bollinger explains it to Talking Numbers:

"The Bands are actually quite simple. There are three lines: the middle band defines the trend, whether stocks (or futures or forex or whatever) are

Wall Street legend Byron Wien says some European stocks are a buy. Is he right?

Are many European stocks undervalued?

That’s what Wall Street legend Byron Wien, Vice Chairman of Blackston Advisory Partner, says. In an interview with CNBC’s Closing Bell on Tuesday, he said:

“I think a number of European stocks are cheap. In the adversity that Europe has experienced in the past year and a half there have been a number of cheap stocks that have popped up. So I think there are opportunities there.”

(Watch the whole thing: Maria Bartiromo interviews Byron Wien)

As noted in a previous Talking Numbers segment, European stocks have underperformed the United States’ S&P 500 index:

In fact, the S&P 500 was beating the major European indices even before yesterday’s news that the Fed would not taper its $85