They will keep doing it as long as there are emotional suckers out there that buy on FOMO and Sell on stop hunts.
If you have a long term view these mob should not affect you. One should really structure their investment in a way that if the stock market closes tomorrow for the next 2-3 years; it is just an inconvenience. The underlying companies will still be there with reasonable cashflow and fundamentals.
Unfortunately, you don't get to choose your business partners in EVN. But if you did you would want them to have cool level heads on their shoulders. Shorts don't stand a chance in that scenario. The only way I know to get there is to have well educated shareholders that focus on what they can do. We can all jump around and scream bloody murder but that won't get us anywhere. If we collectively do a few simple things like...
1. Do not be on margin. If you are on margin and you hate shorts then you are shooting yourself on the foot.- Margin trading and short selling have quite a few common things and one facilitates the other. In margin trading, you must borrow money from a broker to purchase securities. In short selling, you borrow securities to sell them. In both cases, you are borrowing from the broker. The broker is really just the middle man facilitating both position. If you are not on margin then you are not helping shorts.
- If you are on margin you are burning the candle on both ends. This in turn makes you a weak hand in times where the SP under performs. Apart from the dreaded margin call, paying interest on an underperforming asset is a fast way to fall off the registry. Even if you are not an emotionally driven person, logic and the numbers ends up dictating your action to sell.
- Margin calls is music to a shorts ear. If you are chart savvy. You can work out how far from a given support the price needs to go down to gather momentum - stop (loss) hunt. If you compound this knowledge with the Margin LVR then you really know how to impose maximum pain with minimal effort.
Let's leave this here for now as the post is getting large and I do not have the time today. Frankly if retail collectively just do that 1 thing that already hurts shorts quite a bit because this is attacking the very foundation of shorting. If anything it is certainly better than barking at the wrong tree.
Let me know if interested and I'll keep going on the things retail can collectively do to hurt shorts.
(20min delay)