"Looks like shorting hedge funds etc who borrowed stock from Opes are going to have to return the stock pronto. This means they will have to buy them on market. Allco, ABC, Centro etc, etc. Looks like a covering scramble coming but how many and in what stocks?"
This could be the case, but more likely is that hedge funds that borrowed the shares will hold out for as long as they can knowing that ANZ & ML will be big sellers in the market & their selling will in turn trigger other stop losses & margin calls & therefore drive the prices down further & make even larger profits for the shorting funds.
While I feel very sad for the vast majority of innocents that have been caught up in this fiasco, it is ironic that people who bought shares through this system were in fact feeding the very system (short selling of borrowed shares)that would drive down the value of their own shares.
