Posted on 03/13/2009 1:58:05 PM PDT by Positive
I grit my teeth every time I hear comments from CNBC or Fox Business News or political hacks about how benefitical the reinstatement of the "uptick rule" will be.
First, incidentally, there are so many trades being placed electronically from around the world (I've heard 500 trades per second) that a short seller may have to wait 10-15 seconds to make a short sale if an uptick has to happen.
Second, if there are no upticks the stock is in collapse and the results will not change.
Third, and most importantly, A SHORT SALE IS A DEFACTO ORDER TO BUY!!!...
The only way shorts can be covered (closed out) is to BUY the stock back...the final effect being driving the stock higher, sometimes much higher than it should be.
I'm obviously pleased with the stock market's performance this week, and WE SHOULD ALL THANK THE SHORT SELLERS FOR THE BULK OF IT...they have been closing out their short positions (taking profits perhaps) and some taking losses.
Does anyone here think that the fundamental value of Citi has increased by 80% this week?
Crimminies...the government IS the problem!
A short is as good as a long. You can make money going either way if you’re smart, fast and good.
In fact most things usually go down faster than they go up.
What happened to Citi is I called them and told them that arbitrarily raising the interest on my outstanding balance from 9.9% to 14.9% wasn't cool. When they put the rate back where it was, investors realized the people there weren't completely stupid and wouldn't immediately lose my business forever. That's what made the difference, I'm sure.
You are providing an uptick by placing your order at the higher price than the last sale. You don’t have to wait.
That's not exactly correct. The short sale can only be executed AFTER an up tick...the short sale can't be THE uptick.
A simple whole number example would go like this: STOCK bid is 49 ask is 50. You can't sell at 50 you sell at 49. If the stock trades 50,49,50,49,48,49,48,49,47,48,47,48 - there has been no "uptick". Now if the next trade in the above sequence was 49 that would be an uptick and you could short the stock at 48 presuming the one dollar spread I used in the example.
The problem is that stocks now trade in pennies, like 49.99-50.00 and billions of shares per day, so upticks show up very frequently.
The uptick rule is simply for PR.
There are LEGAL ways around the rule that regulators know about, politicians don’t but want to act like they are doing something.
exactly. It is silly to expect a govt bureaucracy to regulate the highly decentralized and adaptive free market.
BTW, we used to call “bullets” (selling a falling market)
I am a shorter. I prefer gravity to climbing a hill.
The market would be toast without us shorters.
I make my living trading, and have for about 10 yrs now. I traded stocks when the uptick rule was in effect and it made absolutely no difference. There are so many trades that there is always an uptick. I never had a problem getting shorts.
Reinstating the ‘uptick rule’ is pure political bs.
The only folks who want stock to go down are those who want to buy it at a lower price and the shorts who want to gain by the stock price declining.
Shorting to drive the price down is not a viable way to get the stock at a lower price.
The shorts don't care if a stock is going up, they only want to profit from a decline in the stock price, they do this by shorting a stock the percieve as "over-priced" or one that is in a down-trend.
The most mis-underestimated aspect of this think is the buy back that is necessary to close out of the trade...if you are one of a million traders who are short a stock, you best be one of the first to get out...it is definitely a herd mentallity because every buy back drives the stock higher and eliminates profits or grows losses for the shorter.
“It’s not so much decentralized, it is extremely adaptive given the rules and types of orders/positions you can utilize if you know them.”
well, it’s decentralized in that anyone with an e-trade account can affect the market. The SEC can’t control all these people and they have no incentive to even try.
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