A "short," in the financial sense, represents a bet that a stock's price will go down. An investor sees a stock they think is overpriced, and they put a short in place to take advantage of the eventual correction.
So far, so good. Nothing wrong with a short in general. It's all part of a healthy market. A stock gets too high...short sellers step in as part of the process of efficient price discovery.
It's the "distort" part that gets...grimy. The strategy here isn't just to short the stock and see what happens. Instead, the investor does what they can to push shares lower. They publish blogs talking about how bad the company is. They tweet about the CEO's questionable personal hygiene. On the far end of the spectrum, they spread rumors and make up stories to spark a sell off (in other words, they distort the truth).
The goal here is to drive share prices lower, so that the short becomes more profitable. It's essentially the opposite of a "pump and dump" strategy, which is based on making a questionable stock look good in order to drive shares higher. Here, the point is to disparage the stock as much as possible to maximize a bet on the decline.
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Finance: What is a Short Sale and what i...5 Views
finance a la shmoop what is a short sale and what is shorting stock
alright you sell a footballer's short when you mumble something about them [Guy looking angry in a sports bar]
never making it to the NFL right think about that all you recruiters who picked [The guy gets punched]
Chad Pennington and Marc Bulger ahead of Tom Brady in the draft Tom made it he's
done you know pretty well for himself and eventually you had to quote buy him [Tom Brady on the field with his hands on his hips]
long unquote when it was clear that he would end up being an NFL icon you'd [Brady celebrating with confetti falling]
have to recognize his real value to the game alright well the same gist is true
with stocks you sell Facebook short because you think the stock is [Stock trader surronded by screens]
overpriced you don't like zucks politics and the
government will regulate the company because of it or because well you just
think that kids who quote made Facebook unquote have migrated to competitors or [Goat going to use a computer]
well they just like the outdoor all right well the process of shorting well [Goat walking around in a field]
you call your broker explain what you want to do she quotes you the borrow or [Defintion of a borrow]
price at which she will loan you shares of Facebook so that you can then sell
them short like say it's a 1% a month it's kind of a borrow number the borrow
was way more expensive than normal margin rates like that's 12 percent a [Borrow calculation shown]
year if you're doing the fancy math there and then you just go ahead and
virtually sell say yeah a thousand shares of Facebook at four hundred bucks
a share sold them short four hundred thousand dollars short position on
Facebook if the stock then goes up 30 bucks well guess what your 30 grand in [Stock chart for facebook showing price increasing]
the hole and that shows up structurally as margin encroachment yeah we like [Big red arrow pointing to the margin encroachment]
football terms and the ticker is FB after all right so if your entire
account only had a hundred grand in it remaining of a margin availability well [ATM showing 100 grand of margin availability]
you're kind of getting into that red zone soon with only 20 grand of room
between you and that 50% margin maximum as it normally applies to retail [Bar showing 'you' approaching the margin maximum]
investors on the other hand if it turns out that well the zuck was actually an [Newspaper front page about Zuckerberg being an Al-Qaeda member]
al-qaeda rep trying to mess with America via making its politics extreme and it's
discovered that he was under Russian spy direction and he's indicted and half the
population angrily turns immediately away from Facebook and the stock [Other newspaper stories]
suddenly drop a hundred bucks well then you've [Stock chart showing price plummeting]
notionally made a hundred grand that's a thousand shares times a hundred bucks
shorted it right you shorted it four hundred down to three hundred you're a
thousand shares times hundred bucks and money why just notionally well because a [Gain calculation is shown]
you still have the short position yes you're in the money with it but you
still hold it short be because you're still paying that one percent a month
interest on the borrow to hold that short position all right so how do you
remove the notionally tag and just get your winnings of a hundred grand you buy [Notionally tag attached to a sack of money is cut up]
the shares that's called unwinding the short and [Unwinding the short stamp]
yet you just go into the market instruct your broker to buy a thousand shares
that the $300 a share it's trading at now deliver those shares to the [The shares are handed over to the brokerage]
brokerage that loaned them to you and then close out your position to book a
tidy hundred grand in profits on your short and you celebrate until you stop [Guy throws a load of money in the air]
why stop because you remember that all gains from the shorting of
stock are taxed at the userís ordinary income tax rates meaning you don't keep
anywhere near that hundred grand of gain if you live in a blue state you'll [Blue states shown on a map of the US]
probably keep something closer to half that amount and you know the old saying [The stack of cash is halved]
buy low sell high while this one is a just sell High buy low that's the long
and the short of it
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