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Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

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191–200 of 403 posts

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#191

Wow, it seems like none of the top commenters here have put in at least minimal effort to read and understand this. The author does not complain about short sellers per se or about the fact that more than 100% of a stock's float can be shorted. That is all nice and fine. Instead what the author does complain about is that fact that the (supposedly regulated) mechanisms for shorting a stock are fraught with loopholes…

Can only agree. There is a really simple reason for not allowing naked short selling and that is the potential for effectively creating a divide by 0 error, when the short sellers have to cover their short, and there aren't enough shares available. It really is that simple.

While this doesn't mean a price of infinity, since price is also constrained by the available money for the purchase, in reality this then becomes a liquidity trap which is guaranteed to bankrupt the least liquid short sellers until enough positions have gone under to bring the short position down under the float size. So whilst some flexibility may make sense to resolve some of the buffering issues with settling, if that is being deliberately exploited as claimed in the article, that is a huge regulatory problem.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#192
post #139

This is mostly nonsense. There is nothing wrong with there being more shares short than shares outstanding. It just seems problematic, until you think it through. Person A has 1 share of company Y. Person B borrows 1 share of company Y from person A, and then sells it into the market. This is called a short sale. But person B just sold their borrowed share. Now that share is owned by person C. Person C can now lend i…

> Shorting behaves the same way that fractional reserve banking does Yes. Except that the fractional reserve banking system has a lender of last resort.

And the whole "fractional" word. You can't lend someone 10 shares based on the one you bought.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#193
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a generic and ideological objection. If that was the case we would never need any regulations, just T&Cs. I get that some people believe that, but equally some people believe such a world would have way too much friction.

This is not a generic and ideological objection. This is an explanation of how it does actually work. The brokers I have experience with either propose you to participate in a share-lending program with profit sharing (opt-in) or propose two different kinds of accounts and you can disallow lending but then the conditions are slightly worse (some fees are waived if you let them loan your shares). The shares are not "s…

A lot of things look like cheating, when one only skims the first page of the rule book and then plays.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#194

Shitty companies failing is a necessary and important mechanism of a functioning economy. Look at the Soviet Union for an example of what happens when no companies ever go bankrupt. Short activists expose shitty companies and as such, they play an important role in the economy. Maybe Wirecard's fraud scheme would still be going on if it wasn't for short sellers. Maybe shorting, in particular naked shorting, is not id…

Shitty company will go down in a natural way in a free market economy. Why do you feel you need to help it to go down? Why let people make money on someone's fail? Why let people have incentives to ruin other people lives?

If it's a free market economy why would shorting be banned? When it comes to that, why would naked short selling be banned? Free market means the market would decide on whether they want it or not and regulations would be gone.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire topic has been poorly addressed. I don’t think I’ve had stronger Gell Mann vibes on HN than I’m having with this story.

Seconded. The last week has been actually quite unsettling and completely changed my perception of HN.

Unfortunately I've also had all of this confused nonsense explained in real life to me from people I respect. I think people are bored from the pandemic and the excitement of something nefarious to rail against prevents them from looking into the facts

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the distinction here between what you call "order book" markets and "market made markets". Surely anything traded on a central limit order book requires outstanding limit orders to provide liquidity and therefore all order book markets are "market made"? Or are you working with some specific technical definitions here?

> Surely anything traded on a central limit order book requires outstanding limit orders to provide liquidity and therefore all order book markets are "market made"? No. Some markets, e.g. the NYSE, have specialists [1]. They support the market even when there is nobody else on one side of the order book. When companies list on the NYSE, they are explicitly asking for a group of market makers to be able to naked shor…

Ah okay thanks. I always just considered professional market makers (as described there) as just another kind of participant or counter-party who just has a particular strategy and maybe takes advantage of volume rebates or similar (but basically transparent) incentives to act as a liquidity provider.

But I see that you're making a comparison about bitcoin markets where that kind of structure is mostly not there.

That reminds me. For anyone interested, there's an interview with a HFT market-making guy here who set up the LXDX exchange for crypto derivatives and who talks a bit about the differences in market microstructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkhLZXLb8mU

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#197

Wow, it seems like none of the top commenters here have put in at least minimal effort to read and understand this. The author does not complain about short sellers per se or about the fact that more than 100% of a stock's float can be shorted. That is all nice and fine. Instead what the author does complain about is that fact that the (supposedly regulated) mechanisms for shorting a stock are fraught with loopholes…

That isn't correct. He complains in incredibly hyperbolic terms about short-selling in general. For example, "It is important to understand that selling a stock short is not an investment in American enterprise. [...] A successful short manipulation takes money from investment in American enterprise and diverts it to feed Wall Street's insatiable greed—the company that was attacked is worse off and the investing public has lost money. [...] This national disgrace is a parasite on the greatest capital market in the world."

The tone of this is just short of complaining about "the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids". But what they say is all exactly true of all speculation, short and long. The only thing that's actually an "investment in American enterprise" is buying new shares in a public offering. The rest is just gambling on the outcome to "feed Wall Street's insatiable greed".

Indeed, one could argue, as short-sellers do, that unchecked positive hype is more damaging to market participants, because it obscures the underlying value of a instrument causing people to overpay. When people buy something overvalued, they've already lost money; they just don't know it yet. Shorting helps keep those dastardly long-sellers in check, keeping them from stealing the hard-earned money of retail investors everywhere. If shorts manage to momentarily drive a price down below the intrinsic value, why they've just created a bargain for savvy investors. They are in fact doing a public service that otherwise would have to be performed by intrusive regulators. Etc, etc.

I think the truth lies between. Speculation, short and long, is economically valuable because it aids in price discovery, creating a liquid market so that actual investors in a company can exit, freeing up capital for further new investment. One could argue (and I often do) that we have way more speculation than we need to fill that economic purpose. But complaining bitterly about just the skeptical side of that speculation is like arguing that Hacker News should only allow positive comments about startups.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#198
post #139

This is mostly nonsense. There is nothing wrong with there being more shares short than shares outstanding. It just seems problematic, until you think it through. Person A has 1 share of company Y. Person B borrows 1 share of company Y from person A, and then sells it into the market. This is called a short sale. But person B just sold their borrowed share. Now that share is owned by person C. Person C can now lend i…

This is the problem - someone is selling something they don't own. It's like you borrowed a car from a rental company and then you sold it to someone. Pretty sure that's a crime. If this is allowed on the stock market, then I think this is laziness of law enforcement that they don't know what to do with it. What if the owner wants the item back and the person you sold it to won't sell it? It seems like this may be the problem with Gamestop. If people hold on to their shares, whoever "shorted" them is in a big trouble and rightfully so.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#199
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options are bets in a way that actual sales aren't. Notably, a put explicitly a contract to sell something at a given price in the future. Nobody buying or selling a put has any intention of stock trading hands -- and the option can even be written as cash-only, where stock never actually does. So while selling a put is the same fundamental idea as a short ("I think the price will go down"), it's mechanically very di…

You know that a put and a call combine to make a synthetic stock? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put%E2%80%93call_parity (If you write a put and a call for the same strike, you are basically in the same position as a short seller. If you buy a put and a call for the same strike, you are economically in the same position as an owner of the stock.) Hence, you can't separate options from stocks.

This is not entirely accurate. It is the same position as borrowing some amount of money to buy the stock. If I buy a put and call and the price at expiry is exactly that strike I am guaranteed to lose money.

Re: Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

#200
post #139

This is mostly nonsense. There is nothing wrong with there being more shares short than shares outstanding. It just seems problematic, until you think it through. Person A has 1 share of company Y. Person B borrows 1 share of company Y from person A, and then sells it into the market. This is called a short sale. But person B just sold their borrowed share. Now that share is owned by person C. Person C can now lend i…

> This is mostly nonsense. Agreed. People should be able to take the pessimistic side of a trade. The one problem I could see with short selling is not the technical act of selling short, but the (dis)information campaign around a company that appears to follow. But, this happens both ways good and bad so it's probably a wash. > Most of Wall Street hates short sellers, because they drive down the prices of companies…

> But, this happens both ways good and bad so it's probably a wash.

Only if you ignore reality. Huge hedge funds are called market movers for a reason. These hedge funds decide to short your company's stock and they have a direct impact on your stock value regardless of whether the hedge fund has any basis for actually shorting. Their "reason" can be 100% bullshit. Doesn't matter. They put a large short position on your company and it has an immediate direct impact.

Not only that, like you said about disinformation, it also allows them to get other parts of the market to also jump on board.

The way shorting works with hedge funds is that it is a self fulfilling prophecy a huge majority of the time

And people talk about how capitalism has driven companies to only care about the next quarter. Everyone realizes this is overall a bad thing. Short sellers are one of the reasons you have to do that.

I don't believe shorts have any intrinsic value they are actually bringing to the market. People choosing not to buy stock at existing prices does the same thing people claim shorting does. You don't need to borrow stock and sell it back making a profit to have a functioning trading system.

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