General comments/chat, page-18832

I'm puzzled re everyone's obsession with how many ADN shares have been shorted. At the end of the day, it's just noise. Short positions are still less than 1% of ADN's market cap. The idea that brokers can lend out your and my stock (which they don't own) is, as far as I'm aware, incorrect. Brokers cannot lend out our stock. Only the owners of the stock can lend it out - that why shorting activity picked up recently when ADN was added to the All Ordinaries Index, institutions bought stock and some of these institutions have subsequently lent out that stock.

However, as I say, to me its a waste of time monitoring shorting activity on a daily basis. Who cares about the shorting. In the long term, the stock market is a weighing machine, not a voting machine (in the short to medium term it often acts as a voting machine). Long term, the market will weigh the stock - if it's fundamentally overvalued, the price will fall. If it's fundamentally undervalued, the price will rise. Simple. The hard part is deciding if a stock is fundamentally undervalued or overvalued. Once you have made your decision and invested accordingly, the short term price action IMO is largely irrelevant.