shorting through futures

Discussion in 'Index Futures' started by black diamond, Sep 23, 2008.

  1. It seems like you could get around the short ban by shorting index futures and buying back all the components other than the what you wanted to short. Maybe this is impractical for most individuals but I am sure it is doable for many market participants, and as far as I can tell is not prohibited.

    So does anybody have any idea if this is happening to any great extent, or what signs there would be? I would guess you could get some idea from trading volumes if the markets were relatively normal, but probably not with the stuff going on now.

    Any thoughts how this would affect the index futures markets? My guess is that you would just be forcing some market maker to do the short sales you cannot with no real impact. But it would probably mess up trading strategies based on analyzing order flow and volume.