Wow, how has nobody noticed this before? This looks seriously rotten:
> Michigan-based entrepreneur Robert Simpson decided to see what would happen if he bought the entire stock of one company. Using a single broker, within a couple of days Simpson had paid a little over $5,000 for 1,285,050 shares in OTC bulletin board property-development company Global Links. According to Simpson, these shares were delivered into his account shortly afterwards. Yet the following day 37,044,500 Global Links shares were traded on the bulletin board. The next day, 22,471,000 shares were traded. On neither day had Simpson traded a single Global Link share, he insists. And events surrounding Simpson's investments became yet more confusing. Global Links had only ever issued 1,158,064 shares. Simpson had managed to acquire 126,986 shares that did not exist. How he had managed to be sold more shares than were in issuance is exactly the question Simpson hoped his foray would raise.
There were some compounding factors for this situation, in particular a reverse split.
"Global Links was caught off guard by the events that transpired in February 2005 when it implemented a one-for-350 reverse split of its stock, the result of which would reduce its float from 350 million shares to 1.1 million. ... Some have said it is all a simple matter of broker error. Accounts showing 350,000 old shares of Global Links should have been adjusted by the broker to show 350 [sic, should be 1000?] of the new shares, but some have said that didn't happen"
Recent events have a lot of people confusing high short interest with naked shorting.
A stock can have short interest greater than 100% without any naked shorting.
How is this possible? The textbook definition of a "short sale" is that someone borrows stock and then, literally, sells it short. The buyer of the stock is free and clear to do whatever they want with the stock, including re-lend it for another short sale. Wikipedia has a good primer on how this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
This has created a lot of confusion on WallstreetBets, where many participants have come to believe that Gamestop's short interest of 113% means that there are 13% more shares shorted than long positions to cover. It's not true, though, because the long interest is always greater than the short interest.
And just for completeness on your comment, a naked short is the same as a regular short, but in the opposite order. First sold short, then borrowed after the fact.
Does this mean that there is still only 100% of stocks available and the ratio of iou's to total stocks 113/100?
I guess that makes sense that a person can borrow a stock, sell it, borrow it again from the second buyer, sell it again. The number of stocks floating around stay the same, however, the number of iou's increases. Likewise, a person can buy the one share, return it, then buy it again, and return it again to settle the second of the iou's.
Interesting that nobody is really explaining the mechanics of how this works. Makes me wonder if a lot of retail investors are about to get hurt.
I’ve seen that explained on WSB. I don’t think there’s much confusion about it. Nonetheless, SI being that high will inevitably drive the price up to unwind, and take quite some time to unwind. The evidence of naked shorts (which Market Makers are permitted to do to enable liquidity) seems primarily based on FTDs.
In addition to the shorts, when people buy call options - doesn't that mean someone else is on the hook to provide shares at a later date, and they might not hold them at the time of selling the option?
Every so often, someone gets very steamed about short selling, often with no real reason. Back in 2005, someone got very steamed about short selling, and then got a journalist to write a somewhat confused article about it. It's not clear anything was actually wrong then, but in any case, the rules have been changed a few times since then, so there doesn't seem to be any obvious relevance to current times.
It's also worth noting that there's no real theoretical basis for why naked short selling would be harmful, no real empirical evidence showing it is harmful, no general laws against it, and the structure of the market allows and expects it to take place in some specific cases. If your mental model is that the stock market is a tool to allow people to trade a fixed number of concrete objects back and forth, this probably seems odd, but since that's not really a good model of how the stock market works or is intended to work, it's not clear that means much.
> If your mental model is that the stock market is a tool to allow people to trade a fixed number of concrete objects back and forth, this probably seems odd, but since that's not really a good model of how the stock market works or is intended to work, it's not clear that means much.
I'm pretty sure that's how the stock market is actually intended to work. This should be obvious if you consider things like dividends. There needs to be a fixed number of shares, each with a clear owner for that to work.
The reason it's a bit more complicated in practice, is because historically the technology wasn't there to do realtime gross settlement. So to limit the number of transactions that the central database had to handle, layers of delayed net settlement were set up instead.
I think you could make an argument that allowing naked shorting could in fact be beneficial. Part of what's allowing gamestop stock to explode recently is that it's next to impossible to find shares to borrow for shorting. If everyone who wanted to short the stock could do so without having to borrow shares, price discovery might work significantly better. (I assume the counter-argument would be that short squeezes could be even more intense. But perhaps they would be less likely to occur in the first place.)
I'm pretty certain you can trace a lot of the current fervour over short-sellers to Elon Musk's ongoing paranoid rants about how they're evil and trying to ruin Tesla. There's likely a large crossover between WallStreetBets posters and Elon Musk fans.
Should have a [2005] in the title. This is probably showing up on HN because naked short selling is topical, but the information in the article might be misleading if it's out of date.
/wallstreetbets are, in their own insane way, doing research into the most extreme tactics that short sellers have employed in the past.. expecting the entire arsenal to be employed tomorrow when trading begins.
Note: Shorting more than 100% of shares outstanding does not imply that there is naked shorting happening. You can re-borrowing the shares someone shorted and it happens.
The perils of fractional reserve banking can arise in any centralized custodial arrangement. As long as no one performs a physical audit—or there is no physical object to be audited in the first place—then accounting fraud can and will happen.
This is, in my opinion, the raison d’etre of blockchain. Public, immutable ledgers are immune to this kind of fraud (although they have other issues, of course).
Fractional reserve banking in the real economy is utterly irrelevant thanks to the FDIC backstopping a run. In the last [edit: 88] years nobody had lost a single penny to a bank run or default including 2008s WaMu default thanks to the FDIC.
Crypto fractional reserve like tether has no backstop and that’s a completely different beast. It’s what exacerbated the Great Depression.
As with all blockchain unless the state is 100% totally and utterly encapsulated within the blockchain, then it’s garbage in, garbage immutably recorded. Which is why the only thing you can do with crypto is currency and kitties.
Well fractional reserve banking is accounting fraud. Widespread and legal, but fraud nevertheless.
Also fractional reserve banking is a thing of the past. We've now evolved to no reserve banking. The banks' ability to create money from thin air is almost unrestrained.
> The stock borrow programme at the DTCC, they allege, enables the naked shorting of shares to the extent that the number of shares in circulation of some companies is now several times in excess of that issued. Even companies listed on the NYSE, could have been affected. As Wes Christian, partner in law firm Christian, Smith & Jewell in Houston, and lead lawyer on several of the cases, explains: "With the revelation of the Regulation SHO Threshold Securities list and the Leslie Boni report, published in November 2004 [see glossary], it is now crystal clear that this problem of naked short selling is systemic in Wall Street, and virtually impacts every business sector on every exchange including numerous billion-dollar companies listed on the NYSE and other companies listed on the Amex."
When I was in PFG Marketer Services I saw million dollar double payout fuckups all the time and a shady SQL Server database for "manual over-rides" on commissions to brokers that seemed like an un-audited slush fund.
When the number of shares trading is no longer bound by the number of shares issued by the companies they're supposedly shares of, their value and thus price becomes completely meaningless.
Perhaps you could normalize the price using short interest %, but that's not even reported real-time and would be an approximate at best estimation of how much inflation fuckery is going on with the # of shares.
This whole thing reeks of corruption and manipulation IMHO, I'm shocked this isn't explicitly illegal and it's making me lose all interest in participating.
This seems like it should be easily monitored. You're not allowed to sell short shares that you don't actually have access to. How is that not an easy thing to determine during the transaction?
Basic rule of thumb is any company where the management is whining about shorts, and about naked shorts in particular, is garbage. The reason companies get shorted over 100% of outstanding shares is because everybody agrees they are garbage. Not a conspiracy. Go look at the stock of the absurd company in question after you read this article.
Here's what Robert Simpson of ZANN Corp. was doing at the time: using his position in company A to buy his side gig company B. Whenever you dig into these guys for even 5 minutes they always turn out to be sleazy.
Yes “naked shorting” is a technical failure that hasn’t been a real problem in forever, but us frequently cited by shady CEOs as cover for why their stock price fell. Patrick Byrnes is one famous example.
From this very article: “ Alan Sporn, former president and major shareholder of OTC bulletin board company Trident Systems, is suing a group of brokers who, he claims, utilized a number of techniques, including the stock borrow program, to undermine the price of Trident's stock. This attack on the value of the company's stock virtually destroyed the company, both in terms of raising capital for growth, and in depressing the value of the shareholders' investments to virtually nothing, claims Sporn.”
Sporn case was so weak the judge ruled for sanctions against him and he had to negotiate an agreement to avoid being stuck with defendants court costs.
The most important aspect of naked short selling is why it's a thing. Naked short selling is used as a weapon by short sellers. The purpose is to push down the stock price by artificially increasing supply relative to demand, perpetuating the sell spiral. Thereby, the short sellers can further increase their profit on short sales.
[+] [-] slashdev|5 years ago|reply
> Michigan-based entrepreneur Robert Simpson decided to see what would happen if he bought the entire stock of one company. Using a single broker, within a couple of days Simpson had paid a little over $5,000 for 1,285,050 shares in OTC bulletin board property-development company Global Links. According to Simpson, these shares were delivered into his account shortly afterwards. Yet the following day 37,044,500 Global Links shares were traded on the bulletin board. The next day, 22,471,000 shares were traded. On neither day had Simpson traded a single Global Link share, he insists. And events surrounding Simpson's investments became yet more confusing. Global Links had only ever issued 1,158,064 shares. Simpson had managed to acquire 126,986 shares that did not exist. How he had managed to be sold more shares than were in issuance is exactly the question Simpson hoped his foray would raise.
[+] [-] fractionalhare|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] femto113|5 years ago|reply
"Global Links was caught off guard by the events that transpired in February 2005 when it implemented a one-for-350 reverse split of its stock, the result of which would reduce its float from 350 million shares to 1.1 million. ... Some have said it is all a simple matter of broker error. Accounts showing 350,000 old shares of Global Links should have been adjusted by the broker to show 350 [sic, should be 1000?] of the new shares, but some have said that didn't happen"
https://www.forbes.com/2006/08/25/naked-shorts-global-links-...
[+] [-] rwmj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WanderPanda|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cush|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
A stock can have short interest greater than 100% without any naked shorting.
How is this possible? The textbook definition of a "short sale" is that someone borrows stock and then, literally, sells it short. The buyer of the stock is free and clear to do whatever they want with the stock, including re-lend it for another short sale. Wikipedia has a good primer on how this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
This has created a lot of confusion on WallstreetBets, where many participants have come to believe that Gamestop's short interest of 113% means that there are 13% more shares shorted than long positions to cover. It's not true, though, because the long interest is always greater than the short interest.
[+] [-] anaphor|5 years ago|reply
So that kind of points towards a possibility of naked shorts, if I understand correctly (although by itself it doesn't prove it's happening).
[+] [-] jaycroft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zappo2938|5 years ago|reply
I guess that makes sense that a person can borrow a stock, sell it, borrow it again from the second buyer, sell it again. The number of stocks floating around stay the same, however, the number of iou's increases. Likewise, a person can buy the one share, return it, then buy it again, and return it again to settle the second of the iou's.
Interesting that nobody is really explaining the mechanics of how this works. Makes me wonder if a lot of retail investors are about to get hurt.
[+] [-] gridder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rptr4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstrat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traktor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
Every so often, someone gets very steamed about short selling, often with no real reason. Back in 2005, someone got very steamed about short selling, and then got a journalist to write a somewhat confused article about it. It's not clear anything was actually wrong then, but in any case, the rules have been changed a few times since then, so there doesn't seem to be any obvious relevance to current times.
It's also worth noting that there's no real theoretical basis for why naked short selling would be harmful, no real empirical evidence showing it is harmful, no general laws against it, and the structure of the market allows and expects it to take place in some specific cases. If your mental model is that the stock market is a tool to allow people to trade a fixed number of concrete objects back and forth, this probably seems odd, but since that's not really a good model of how the stock market works or is intended to work, it's not clear that means much.
[+] [-] wcoenen|5 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that's how the stock market is actually intended to work. This should be obvious if you consider things like dividends. There needs to be a fixed number of shares, each with a clear owner for that to work.
The reason it's a bit more complicated in practice, is because historically the technology wasn't there to do realtime gross settlement. So to limit the number of transactions that the central database had to handle, layers of delayed net settlement were set up instead.
[+] [-] tempestn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiralx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tokelin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theknocker|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tristanj|5 years ago|reply
The "self-replenishing pool" missing image is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201104113520im_/https://cdn.eu...
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anaphor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fractionalhare|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
/wallstreetbets are, in their own insane way, doing research into the most extreme tactics that short sellers have employed in the past.. expecting the entire arsenal to be employed tomorrow when trading begins.
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
This is, in my opinion, the raison d’etre of blockchain. Public, immutable ledgers are immune to this kind of fraud (although they have other issues, of course).
[+] [-] arcticbull|5 years ago|reply
Crypto fractional reserve like tether has no backstop and that’s a completely different beast. It’s what exacerbated the Great Depression.
As with all blockchain unless the state is 100% totally and utterly encapsulated within the blockchain, then it’s garbage in, garbage immutably recorded. Which is why the only thing you can do with crypto is currency and kitties.
[+] [-] beefield|5 years ago|reply
2. Cough, Tether audits, cough.
[+] [-] xadhominemx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|5 years ago|reply
Also fractional reserve banking is a thing of the past. We've now evolved to no reserve banking. The banks' ability to create money from thin air is almost unrestrained.
[+] [-] harikb|5 years ago|reply
> The stock borrow programme at the DTCC, they allege, enables the naked shorting of shares to the extent that the number of shares in circulation of some companies is now several times in excess of that issued. Even companies listed on the NYSE, could have been affected. As Wes Christian, partner in law firm Christian, Smith & Jewell in Houston, and lead lawyer on several of the cases, explains: "With the revelation of the Regulation SHO Threshold Securities list and the Leslie Boni report, published in November 2004 [see glossary], it is now crystal clear that this problem of naked short selling is systemic in Wall Street, and virtually impacts every business sector on every exchange including numerous billion-dollar companies listed on the NYSE and other companies listed on the Amex."
[+] [-] crb002|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|5 years ago|reply
https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320xkhl0443w/naked-short...
Perhaps posting an archive.org URL adds a certain mystique, though?
[+] [-] pengaru|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps you could normalize the price using short interest %, but that's not even reported real-time and would be an approximate at best estimation of how much inflation fuckery is going on with the # of shares.
This whole thing reeks of corruption and manipulation IMHO, I'm shocked this isn't explicitly illegal and it's making me lose all interest in participating.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
With GME there isn’t evidence of naked shorting. There are legitimate ways for shorts to be greater than the float. See https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/6850771-bachhandel/554975... for an explanation
[+] [-] beezle|5 years ago|reply
https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
[+] [-] ineedasername|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrPatan|5 years ago|reply
Since GME, has anybody heard again the old canard "blockchain? What can it do that a database can't?"
[+] [-] GizmoSwan|5 years ago|reply
Block chain type code can prevent the excess being issued.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tecc501|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tecc501|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeffbee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|5 years ago|reply
https://www.lawinsider.com/contracts/Xj9WHIykaxCDFh0BX4XNQ/z...
[+] [-] valuearb|5 years ago|reply
From this very article: “ Alan Sporn, former president and major shareholder of OTC bulletin board company Trident Systems, is suing a group of brokers who, he claims, utilized a number of techniques, including the stock borrow program, to undermine the price of Trident's stock. This attack on the value of the company's stock virtually destroyed the company, both in terms of raising capital for growth, and in depressing the value of the shareholders' investments to virtually nothing, claims Sporn.”
Sporn case was so weak the judge ruled for sanctions against him and he had to negotiate an agreement to avoid being stuck with defendants court costs.
https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21558818
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtech|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cccc4all|5 years ago|reply