Before Short Selling-Know These Shocking Facts
March 8th, 2010 by Ahmad Hassam | No Comments | Filed in Wealth BuildingMany brokerage firms make it easy to sell short. When you place the order to sell a stock, the brokerage asks you whether you are selling shares you own or selling short. In case of short selling, the brokerage firm goes about borrowing the shares for you to sell. It loans the shares to your account and executes the sell order.
In some cases,a stock gets so much shorted that there are no more shares of that stock left for you or your broker to borrow anymore. Now, you cannot always short a stock instantly. Most of the investors work on rumors. In that case, you simple will have to cross your fingers and see how the other short sellers do on that stock while you search for another stock to short!
Day traders are not looking for long term fundamentals in order to go short. A day trader might go short on a stock that had go up for three consecutive days, figuring that they will go down on the fourth day. Day traders are only looking for stock that might go down in price for mundane reasons.
In simple words, once the stock starts to move down, you cannot short it. You will have to wait for its price to move up on the last trade, before your short selling order can be executed by the broker. Now, you cannot straight away short a stock as there are mechanisms in place employed by msot of the stock exchanges that don’t want a massive shorting attack on a stock. There is the famous Uptick Rule that has been put in place to prevent that from happening. What the Uptick Rule means is that you cannot short a stock unless it moves up on the last trade. This rule has been placed to prevent a stock from being driven down to almost zero by short sellers.
How much risky short selling can be? Well, in theory there is no stopping a stock price to reach the sky. So if you are wrong in your short selling decision, your loss can be catastrophic. But don’t worry, short sellers also use stop loss so if the price starts to move up, your position will get closed automatically by the stop loss order.
There is something known as Short Squeeze. A short squeeze happens when the stock of the company that you have shorted has some good news that drives the stock prices high. Now if this happens, many short sellers might lose money and even get margin calls. When they get desperate to buy back the stock, its prices go even higher hurting them more.
As said before, companies, investors and many brokers hate short sellers. They think that short sellers had intentionally driven down the stock prices. So sometimes, they will spread rumors of good news to create a momentary short squeeze. Sometimes, a campaign will be started by the owners of a particular stock instructing their brokers not to loan out their stocks to short sellers. So if you have already shorted that stock, you might get a call from your broker to return that stock immediately. In such a case, you will have to immediately return the stock even if it doesn’t make any sense to you!
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