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Bets against the value of Israeli companies spiked in the days before the October 7th Hamas attacks, suggesting some traders may have had advance knowledge of the looming terror attack and profited off it, according to new research released Monday. The preliminary research, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, is from law professors at Columbia University and New York University and details a “significant” and “unusual” spike five days before the attacks in short selling in the most popular fund linked to Israeli companies. Short selling is a way to bet against the value of a security.

Investors linked to Hamas may have reaped massive financial windfalls from the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, according to a pair of prominent US researchers — who discovered major bets against stocks of Israeli companies that were placed during the weeks leading up to the massacre. In an explosive report published Monday titled “Trading on Terror?,” law professors Robert Jackson Jr. of New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University detailed suspicious stock trading activity that has since sparked a probe by Israeli authorities. In one shocking example cited in the the 67-page paper, an unidentified trader shorted 4.43 million...

South Korea from Monday will re-impose a ban on short-selling shares at least until June to promote a "level playing field" for retail and institutional investors, financial authorities said on Sunday. The ban was lifted in May 2021 for trades involving the shares of companies with large market capitalisation included in the KOSPI200 and KOSDAQ150 share price indices. The restriction has remained in place for most other stocks. The FSC will review market activity in June to decide whether there is significant improvement to allow the ban to be lifted, he said. The regulator last week said it would establish...

Update: The Reddit subgroup WallStreetBets is back up this evening. What an amazing story! Reddit shut down its WallStreetBets subreddit page on Wednesday afternoon after rookie stock market investors in the general public joined together to purchase stock in targeted companies causing a major disruption in the stock market and resulting in several hedge funds to go bust. Of course, Reddit blamed “racism” and “hate speech” for removing the community. According to The Verge, Discord has banned the r/WallStreetBets server. Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit is the driver of an unprecedented rally of GameStop stock, and has received a great deal of...

March 21 (Reuters) - Investors betting on declines in U.S. stocks saw big profits in the last month as equities crashed while the global spread of coronavirus darkened economic prospects and net increases in short selling implying no turnaround in bearish sentiment. Short sellers borrow shares in the hope of buying them back at a cheaper price and pocketing the difference. U.S. shorts saw a one-month paper profit of $343.67 billion from the S&P 500 and Nasdaq's Feb. 19 peaks through to March 19, according to the latest data from financial technology and analytics firm S3 Partners, which measures bets...

China is asking for stock trading records from Chinese and foreign brokerages to find investors who are shorting stocks Michelle Price, Pete Sweeney Today at 6:06 PM HONG KONG/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China is asking foreign and Chinese-owned brokerages in Hong Kong and Singapore to hand over stock trading records, sources with direct knowledge of the requests told Reuters, extending its pursuit of investors shorting Chinese stocks to overseas jurisdictions. Three sources at Chinese brokerages and two at foreign financial institutions said the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) had sought to identify traders and investors who had taken net short positions,...

Here is a brief sample of some of the measures the Chinese government and the PBOC have unleashed in just the past ten days to prop up the crashing market include: a ban on major shareholders, corporate executives, directors from selling stock for 6 monthsfreezing more than half (1400 at last count per Bloomberg) of the listed companies from trading, blocking fund redemptions, forcing companies to invest in the market, halting IPOs, reducing equity transaction fees, providing daily bailouts to the margin lending authority, reducing margin requirements, boosting buybacks endless propaganda by Beijing Bob. The measures are summarized below.But...

A European market regulator announced Thursday night that short-selling of financial stocks in several countries would be temporarily banned in an effort to stop the support the markets in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain effective Friday. There is already a temporary short-sale ban in Greece and Turkey. It appears that stupidity must be a new form of disease that is contagious. This is the problem with government officials. They respond ALWAYS the same way and NEVER consult history to just perhaps see if by chance their idea has been tried before and what was the result. Every crash is followed...

Cavuto talking about this on FOX Biz network right now. Just broke. He's trying to get more info. Huge, huge news.Here's a Bloomberg story on it. Link only per FR policy:STORY

Germany plans to ban naked short-selling on certain stocks and euro government bonds, a coalition source told Reuters on Tuesday. "From midnight today there will be a ban on naked short selling of certain stocks and euro government bonds," a source told Reuters. No further details were immediately available.

So is that it? Is the downturn over? After bouncing off of 6500, or more than half its peak value, and with Citigroup briefly breaking $1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has rallied back more than 1200 points. So, is it safe to go back in the water? Best to figure out what went wrong first -- what I like to call a bear-raid extraordinaire.The Dow clearly got a boost from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's new and improved plan, announced on Monday, to rid our banks of those nasty toxic assets. The idea is to form a "Public-Private Investment Fund"...

This is the first anniversary of the destruction of Bear Stearns. For a while there, just after it happened, everybody was talking about the role of short selling, both legal and illegal, in Bear’s rather violent passing. Since then, the big question has gone from “who the hell set this fire?” to “how did this place devolve into such a firetrap, anyway?” and “how the hell do we get out of this burning building?” Finding answers to all three questions is vitally important. Yet, I’m a little bothered by the fact that these days, so little attention is being focused...

Could someone post an understandable discription of the "Uptick Rule"? Been trying to get my mind around it, but I could use some examples.

Credit-default-swap traders may need a shorter leash. LIQUIDATION. A GOOD SOAKING. PLENTY OF TEARS. It is real wet out there in the markets. Given all the known big-picture reasons for this drenching, does it makes sense to continue enabling the folks who make and sell umbrellas to force it to rain at will? The people with a stake in umbrella prices who are able to trigger a downpour are the traders who bid up credit-default swaps on individual companies, whether they own their debt or not, and short the stock. In combination, these actions feed signals into the market that...

Bernard Madoff, the Mafia, and the Friends of Michael Milken February 3rd, 2009 by Mark Mitchell In 2005, Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com and future Deep Capture investigative reporter, began a public crusade against illegal naked short selling (hedge funds and brokers creating phantom stock to manipulate stock prices down). He said, over and over, that the crime was destroying public companies and had the potential to trigger a systemic meltdown of our financial markets. Soon after, I began to investigate a network of short sellers, journalists, and miscreants. I concluded that many of the people in this network...

Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told business leaders assembled by the Wall Street Journal in November that the economic crisis facing the country is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before." That has to be one of the most chilling statements I have ever heard uttered by an American political official in my lifetime. It ranks right up there with the transparent arrogance of Clinton administration hotshot Paul Begala's July 1998 explanation of the use of executive orders by the president to go over the heads of Congress: "Stroke of the pen. Law...

As much as $75 billion of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. value was destroyed by the unplanned and chaotic form of the firm's bankruptcy filing in September, according to an internal analysis by the company's restructuring advisers. A less-hurried Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing likely would have preserved tens of billions of dollars of value, according to a three-month study by the advisory firm, Alvarez & Marsal. An orderly filing would have enabled Lehman to sell some assets outside of federal bankruptcy-court protection, and would have given it time to try to unwind its derivatives portfolio in a way that might have...

Three years ago, Deep Capture reporter and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne gave a famous conference call that he titled, “The Miscreant’s Ball.” His thesis was simple: Some short-selling hedge funds collude to destroy public companies by spreading misinformation, orchestrating government witch hunts, filing bogus class-action lawsuits, and, most egregiously, selling billions of dollars worth of phantom stock. In the months that followed “The Miscreants Ball” presentation, a clique of journalists with close ties to short-selling hedge funds and CNBC’s Jim Cramer (himself a former hedge fund manager), set out to sully the reputations of Patrick and everyone else who sought...

Bernard L. Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was one of the most important market makers on Wall Street. And he managed what was, by some estimates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

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