I was referring to people in the back office who do the actually borrowing. they don't talk to people at your level. you are not familiar with the shenanigans involved in this department. your comments imply an unfamiliarity with the inner workings of it. your insults betray your character. you have a chip(s) on you shoulder.
I have been in the business since 1981. I have not seen or heard of whatever you are referring to with any broker I have worked for or was a customer of. This conversation is also not helpful with the topic of the question for this thread. Have a great weekend....we will have to agree to disagree.
Since you can synthetically get the same effect with options as shorting, any inefficiencies in this market should be pretty easy to kill, no?
No. Selling the synthetic (buy put, sell call at same strike) when the underlying is hard to borrow increases, not decreases, the inefficiency. The inefficiency is traded out of existence by natural longs selling their holdings and replacing with long synthetics, or it disappears as the stock comes off the hard-to-borrow list. Example was C around March 2009. The stock was trading at ~$1 while the synthetics were trading for as little as $0.70. Stocks was impossible to borrow. Situation persisted for days.
None of this has anything to do with what broker can get good locates. That being said, your reference to Citibank is a rare case. The stock was part of a large convertible preferred arb that was trading at an enormous discount due to daily buy-ins of failing short stock deliveries. Citibank was also trading with volume that hit 500mm shares on many days. Buying a put options to replace a short stock locate can get expensive for a daytrader.
I meant that the borrow costs are reflected in the synthetic with a break in put call parity equal to the borrow cost, so anyone who wanted to capture the same evil profits that this supposed overrepresented ethnic group (who aren't Jewish but we won't say who they are, Samoan?, Swedish?, Mongolian?) is reaping could do so same as them by selling the synthetic version of same.
ans. is no. 1. the security you want to short has no listed options trading. 2. lack of liquidity in the options market to open and close the trade
If we're talking Citibank here neither of those are true are they? Even in 2009 there were options on C and they were pretty liquid weren't they?