Liabilities exceed assets - so what, page-28

Am I missing something?

You are.

The thing you are missing is that the investment time frames of those who are happy to lend their stock out are of a lot longer duration that yours.

They have a long-term business owner mindset, so they are quite ambivalent as to what happens, over days/weeks or even months, to the prices of the shares that they own.

I sense that a great many small investors would save themselves a world of emotional angst if they adopted a similar approach to the way they invest.