Short-Sale Rule

  

Categories: Tax

See: Short Sale. See: Short Selling.

Shorting a stock involves betting that its price will go down. It's considered a perfectly legimate way to make money on Wall Street. Still, there's always been kind of stigma too it. If you're a short seller, people treat you like you're a professional grave robber, or someone who forecloses on orphanages as a hobby.

Part of this stigma included the short-sale rule. It was a long-standing regulation that stated that a short sale could not be placed on a downtick. So, if a stock's price most recently ticked lower, the short seller had to wait; they had to hold out for a time when the stock had just ticked higher.

The rule was meant to avoid piling on. A stock that was falling could be pushed lower by a bunch of short-sellers jumping onto it. The rule was originally put in place in the 1930s, as part of the post-stock market crash, post-Depression wave of Wall Street reform.

By the 2000s, the rule had become recognized as stale and kind of pointless. It was eventually removed in 2007.

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finance a la shmoop what is a short sale and what is shorting stock

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alright you sell a footballer's short when you mumble something about them [Guy looking angry in a sports bar]

00:12

never making it to the NFL right think about that all you recruiters who picked [The guy gets punched]

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Chad Pennington and Marc Bulger ahead of Tom Brady in the draft Tom made it he's

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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]

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long unquote when it was clear that he would end up being an NFL icon you'd [Brady celebrating with confetti falling]

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have to recognize his real value to the game alright well the same gist is true

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with stocks you sell Facebook short because you think the stock is [Stock trader surronded by screens]

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overpriced you don't like zucks politics and the

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government will regulate the company because of it or because well you just

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think that kids who quote made Facebook unquote have migrated to competitors or [Goat going to use a computer]

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well they just like the outdoor all right well the process of shorting well [Goat walking around in a field]

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you call your broker explain what you want to do she quotes you the borrow or [Defintion of a borrow]

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price at which she will loan you shares of Facebook so that you can then sell

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them short like say it's a 1% a month it's kind of a borrow number the borrow

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was way more expensive than normal margin rates like that's 12 percent a [Borrow calculation shown]

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year if you're doing the fancy math there and then you just go ahead and

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virtually sell say yeah a thousand shares of Facebook at four hundred bucks

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a share sold them short four hundred thousand dollars short position on

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Facebook if the stock then goes up 30 bucks well guess what your 30 grand in [Stock chart for facebook showing price increasing]

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the hole and that shows up structurally as margin encroachment yeah we like [Big red arrow pointing to the margin encroachment]

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football terms and the ticker is FB after all right so if your entire

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account only had a hundred grand in it remaining of a margin availability well [ATM showing 100 grand of margin availability]

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you're kind of getting into that red zone soon with only 20 grand of room

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between you and that 50% margin maximum as it normally applies to retail [Bar showing 'you' approaching the margin maximum]

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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]

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al-qaeda rep trying to mess with America via making its politics extreme and it's

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discovered that he was under Russian spy direction and he's indicted and half the

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population angrily turns immediately away from Facebook and the stock [Other newspaper stories]

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suddenly drop a hundred bucks well then you've [Stock chart showing price plummeting]

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notionally made a hundred grand that's a thousand shares times a hundred bucks

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shorted it right you shorted it four hundred down to three hundred you're a

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thousand shares times hundred bucks and money why just notionally well because a [Gain calculation is shown]

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you still have the short position yes you're in the money with it but you

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still hold it short be because you're still paying that one percent a month

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interest on the borrow to hold that short position all right so how do you

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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]

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the shares that's called unwinding the short and [Unwinding the short stamp]

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yet you just go into the market instruct your broker to buy a thousand shares

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that the $300 a share it's trading at now deliver those shares to the [The shares are handed over to the brokerage]

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brokerage that loaned them to you and then close out your position to book a

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tidy hundred grand in profits on your short and you celebrate until you stop [Guy throws a load of money in the air]

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why stop because you remember that all gains from the shorting of

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stock are taxed at the userís ordinary income tax rates meaning you don't keep

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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]

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probably keep something closer to half that amount and you know the old saying [The stack of cash is halved]

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buy low sell high while this one is a just sell High buy low that's the long

03:26

and the short of it

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