Before Short Selling-Know These Shocking Facts

Short Selling Stocks is one of the favorite day or swing trading strategy. Many traders short stocks. Now many stock brokers make it very easy for the investors and traders to short stocks. Now a days, most of the trading is being done online. When you sell a stock, a message will ask you whether you are selling stocks that you own or you are selling short. With one click, you tell the broker that you are short selling. The broker than goes about and arranges the shares for you to short sell. These shares are a loan to your account.

In some cases, the brokerage firm cannot borrow the shares as so many people have sold the stock short that there are no more shares to borrow. In that case, you will have to find another stock or use another strategy.

Now, shorting is one of the favorite strategies employed by day traders. A day trader may short stock on the mundane reason like its price had been going up for three days and it’s time to come down! Day traders are not fundamental traders. Day traders are simply interested in the daily volatility in the stock. Most even don’t do any financial or fundamental analysis of the companies whose stocks they are trading. Almost all are technicians or what you call technical analysis experts.

You have to be careful about the uptick rule as stock exchanges have rules in place to help maintain an upward bias in the stock market. What this means is that you can only short a stock when the last trade was a move up. In other words, you can’t short a stock that is moving down.

How much risky short selling can be? Well, in theory there is no stopping a stock price to reach the sky. So if you are wrong in your short selling decision, your loss can be catastrophic. But don’t worry, short sellers also use stop loss so if the price starts to move up, your position will get closed automatically by the stop loss order.

There is something known as Short Squeeze. A short squeeze happens when the stock of the company that you have shorted has some good news that drives the stock prices high. Now if this happens, many short sellers might lose money and even get margin calls. When they get desperate to buy back the stock, its prices go even higher hurting them more.

If you have already shorted that stock, you might get a call from your broker to return that stock immediately. In such a case, you will have to immediately return the stock even if it doesn’t make any sense to you!As said before, companies, investors and many brokers hate short sellers. They think that short sellers had intentionally driven down the stock prices. So sometimes, they will spread rumors of good news to create a momentary short squeeze. Sometimes, a campaign will be started by the owners of a particular stock instructing their brokers not to loan out their stocks to short sellers.

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