I've heard quite a few people comment on how wonderful IB's short list is, but they NEVER have shares of the stocks I'm looking to short (at the time a want to short them) like TASR or NPSN or AKSY or EGHT or TSEM, some of which have had HUGE declines where I would've made awesome money! The experience I've had with IB's short list has been worse than when I was with Ameritrash several years ago.
Instead of complaining in all of these threads, why don't you just find a new broker and move on? It's getting annoying to see the same people bashing over and over again.
Because the only reason most of us put up with IB was for the commissions AND because everyone else sucked. Now that's not the case. IB is far from unique; For the shitty customer service, outages all the time, lack of software etc, quirks with TWS: I was willing to put up with a lot, but now I can get roughly the same commissions at TradeStation with none of this baggage....
I absolutely agree with you on IB's short list. It used to be good. These days, on any day, 50% of the symbols I want to short are not available. That's BAD!!!!
I also agree that IB often lacks high momentum stocks to short. A big reason I think is because IB is self clearing, thus it can't easily tap the short inventories of the big clearing firms.
GSCO doesn't even have these to lend.... I am curious...WTF would you want to short a stock that is so hard to borrow? Oh, I see you want to get the stock called back and get smoked on the squeeze....never mind