Ameritrade won't let me short QQQ...It says they are out of them. I swing trade the QQQ and I need to short a lot. For as big as ameritrade is and they don't have QQQ to short is just BS. Any other people have this problem? Has IB ever ran out of QQQ shorts that you know of? Thanks otto.
The market has been in a more or less downward trend for about a week (if you look at something like a 120m swing chart.) Four of the stocks I trade rolled over and showed short on 12-1 or 12-2. I shorted all with Datek/Ameritrade with no problems since most traders were still long. While Ameritrade has a pretty big short inventory, after a "long" move like this they tend to run out of lots of things. This may work well as a contrarian system, when they run out of a short issue, too many people may be leaning the wrong way. Bounce tomorrow???
If you do not own it, and you are Selling it ......then it is a short sale ????It's not a LONG SALE!....... be it on a Plus Tick, minus Tick Or Zero Minus Tick............. You have to Borrow it from somewhere. QQQ's are almost always borrowable, you may have to yell at someone in Stock Loan to actually call their clearing agent or another house. ETFs are indeed exempt from "The PLUS TICK Rule"! ebo
It's not over yet dude, if you ever short (or long) the QQQ, and put a stop order (say, $1 away from your entry price), rest assured that your stop order will be taken out, without the QQQ ever reaching there. That's right. It happened to me twice. I took QQQ swing long on March 2003 (smart, wasn't I?), and put a stop order some bucks away. I come back a few hours later and my position is sold for a miraculous reason. Ok, I enter the position again. Next day, same thing happens. I write Ameritrade and they say that they apologize, perhaps a bad tick activated my stop, and they will re-instate my position if I want to, but since the QQQ are below the price I was sold at (NOT below my stop because my stop was way lower), I may want to re-instate it myself at a better price. And for that you pay $10.99 per trade. Not to mention their unreliable servers which can be down for hours and hours day after day.
I haven't had this problem with IB. I remember a while back Cramer was talking about how the QQQs were hard to borrow so he was looking for a squeeze. I wrote him an e-mail saying that I didn't have a problem borrowing the QQQs through IB and I had a hard time believing the QQQs in general would ever be hard to borrow. He never responded to my e-mail. Are QQQs just like any other stock that at some points in time can't be borrowed? Or can QQQs be synthetically created at any point in time to meet demand?