When the masses scream, the politicos react....only not always in the best way. <a href="http://www.tradersmagazine.com/articledetail.cfm?mag_id=1&aid=1110&year=2002">Full article.</a>
Eliminting short selling all together is ridiculous. Gettting rid of the uptick rule is possible whe SSF arrive.
It was predictable. The sheep have to have a scape goat. <a href="http://www.tradersmagazine.com/articledetail.cfm?mag_id=1&aid=1245&year=2002">source.</a> Reading the article makes me think that the political approach is to give the masses something, while also giving the profession something. We should be OK.
Somebody should explain to the politicians, etc. that there are two sides to every trade. In order to sell a stock, whether going short or liquidating a long position, there has to be a buyer... the essence of the free market system. Buyers provide support not resistence. If a trader goes short, he must later become a buyer, whether to take his profit or cover a losing position. This point, in and of itself, provides support for a stock in decline. A case could actually be made that the more shorts there are on a stock, the more pent up buying pressure, and hence support, there is. The "system" is not bad the way it is. However, if the "short" sighted politicians must do something to appease the "the masses," I say, the best way to "fix" the system is to eliminate the up tick rule. How 'bout that?
who do they think is doing all the buying ? The ONLY reason the markets haven't tanked into the proverbial toilet is the short sellers (and the PPT periodically propping up the market by creating short covering rallies. What a joke. God save us from the SEC.
yep. even if they don't eliminate any shorting rules, they'll still find another way to f@ck us up....
One funny webpage I was on was MSTR on Yahoo. This was around the time that the company was asking it's customers to have their brokers take their stock out of the street name, to squeeze the shorts. At the same time the CEO or whatever he was was selling 10,000 shares a month. The "Mother of all short squeezes" lasted about a day. That was $5 ago on the stock. And I have to speculate that if it were not for shorts covering, all the longs bailing out would have done so at much lower prices.