I short a lot, and since last week I've been getting the message "We currently have 0 shares available to short" several times from IB when before I'd never received this message. Has other people experienced poor short inventory with IB lately, or is it that they changed their messages so that it doesn't just popup the blanket "SHO" message anymore? It's very annoying that this is happening lately, especially since I always thought IB's had pretty thorough short inventory.
We upgraded our systems to provide better inventory control. This means that if we have 10000 shares available, and someone shorts 10000 shares, the remaining amount available will be zero. Right now, the message logic is a bit simplified so that even stocks where there never was inventory return a zero availability to the front end. In the next weeks, we will enhance the client side messaging to distinguish the different scenarios with greater granularity but the end result will be the same: the stock is not shortable at that moment. Note that, as before, rejected short attempts will trigger manual locates attempts to find more inventory and that the actual base shortable inventory from IB is 99% unchanged from a few weeks ago, only the message is different.
If customer deposits at IB are growing by 13% a quarter shouldn't the quantity of stock for each security on the short list grow at this rate as well?
5000 more people does not make 5000 new titles. The 'cannot short' messages are likely on pink sheet or OTCBB stocks or other less-than-blue-chip titles where we never actually had in-house availabbility, nor external sources from which to borrow. jcc