Every time I call up anything not in the top 100 , I get a no borrow, just tried SMTX. Very high % of stocks not shortable. Is it IB or the whole street.
SMTX is on the nasdaq threshold list so I doubt any online broker has it available. I've found IB's short list to be pretty much constant for the past few months.
I just had a look at the easy to borrow list at IB. Not too bad in my opinion. However, I have one question: If I am short a stock and it pays a dividend, will I be bought in before the ex.div. date? I can vaguely remember something about this when I searched IB's site some months ago, but after looking at their site now I can't find anything about it. Does anybody know?
No. I've been short a dividend paying stock through the ex-date and wasn't bought in. The dividend is paid by you on the payment date and debited from your account then.
I believe this applied to some none-US stocks, and was accidentally noted on the US stocks page. They fixed it.
I have two wholesale, fundemental questions. 1) Is there a large cost to a broker to hold equities in their inventory, to be made available for their users to short? 2) Do they maintain trading desks for these inventories to be managed internally and at the same time making the inventory available to the users...sort of trading the inventory while its being held/made available? Michael B.