A technique for enabling hardware transactional memory (HTM) to work more efficiently with readers that can tolerate stale data. In an embodiment, a pre-transaction load request is received from one of the readers, the pre-transaction load request signifying that the reader can tolerate pre-transaction data. A determination is made whether the pre-transaction load request comprises data that has been designated for update by a concurrent HTM transaction. If so, a cache line containing the data is marked as pre-transaction data. The concurrent HTM transaction proceeds without aborting notwithstanding the pre-transaction load request.