newbunch, If you trade online, there may be a formula that your broker uses to assess your ability to cover a short sale (i.e. your liquidity and size of your account etc.) they will give you that messege in leu of telling you that they dont think you know what you're doing....or that they dont think you have enough to cover in the event of a melt up... in short, they dont want to be on the hook if you cant cover etc..... I get the same treatment occasionally...
That's happened to me too, and I was already short! Guess there are a lot of Bond players out there that use the TLT as a hedge ???
Oh, disappointed. Thought you were putting on an explosion spread to the downside. Bonds have lost that loving feeling!
This has been written about here: "Shorting ETFs: The Little Guy Gets The Shaft Again" http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=48089 Just curious, I'm not up on the financial ETF's. Is there an inverse bond ETF, i.e. does the reverse of the TLT? That would solve your problem. Actually according to the article, it would solve the problem for a lot of people.
I may have answered my own question: "Bear necessities" http://foxnews.smartmoney.com/etffocus/index.cfm?story=20060607 Please comment if you know of the details of the above or if you know of a better alternative.
True, but keeping in the spirit of the original post which was why he couldn't short the TLT, I wondered what option (pardon the pun) ... er...ah...what fund/ETF might be available to do the inverse. It turns out that these guys do: http://www.profunds.com/default.asp Not a bad idea.
I have had some luck by calling my broker to get a short sale done when the online interface gives me a "cant locate shares to short" yada yada
I was surfing around and found an interesting site that might be of some use.... the site has put together a M3 money supply proxy using a number of sources as explained..... the Fed stopped reporting M3 in April since it made the dollar look bad.... M3 from their work is roaring ahead at around a 9% rate http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html