Accounting conservatism is the timelier recognition of bad versus good news in earnings. We conjecture that short selling activity is inversely related to conservatism, that is, firms with higher levels of conservatism are less attractive to short sellers. Using short interest as a measure of short selling activity and various currently-used measures of conservatism (negative non-operating accruals, earnings versus cash flows skewness, and Khan and Watts (2009) C Score), we report results consistent with our conjecture. Given the concern expressed by investors and regulators about market manipulation by short sellers, our finding of a substitution effect between conservatism and short selling is of importance.