I currently use Ameritrade and I like to do shorts but I find that Ameritrade never seems to have the shares available to short. Can someone suggest a brokerage that may have more shares available to short then Ameritrade. I usually stay in the 5-12 dollar range. Thanks
I use Scottrade now and that's all I do is short stocks between $5-$20 on the Nasdaq. However I have been debating on moving to IB because I have had a few stocks that were unshortable. And when I looked them up on IB's shortable stocks they were there. So if I were you I would just go to IB.
Don't trade stocks. Trade emini. No short rules on emini's. More volume. Less capital needed. Less risky. No Pattern daytrading rules. Better tax advantages.
I have accounts with IB, TDAmeritrade, and Izone, which is a part of TDAmeritrade. Izone consistently has more stocks available to short than IB. I think it's pretty hard to short stocks with IB. About 50% of the time, IB reports no borrow available, and once, IB even bought me in after letting me short a particular stock because the borrow suddenly became unavailable.
An additional serious problem is that IB's "shortable stock list" is not updated in realtime, and so you might see a stock you want to short on the list, but when you actually try to short it in TWS, you get an error message saying its unshortable. Bottomline, IB's short list is not representative of what you can actually short on IB and is misleading. It's really time for a rehaul of that shortable list and time to offer something better.
how was the message send to you that you could no longer be short the stock? how long were you short the stock before it was called back? how much time did you have to close your position before IB closed the position for you?