Mate it's fine. At my age, I've heard it all. Just...

Mate it's fine. At my age, I've heard it all. Just worried about US crazies infecting Aussies with their drivel and meme stocks.

The shorters you speak off are the same traders/entities/people who gets companies' share values to skyrocket up. Its them who basically get stocks to either become overvalued when they buy (not just undervalued when shorting). Their business model is just different, they don't care if the market is going up or down so long as they make 5% or more margin from portfolio level every month. They lose some in some stocks and win some in others. It's compounding interest. They don't care about the profitability of the actual project/company.

The investors like myself who makes much more money than them, our business model is taking the risk of funding a project/company to get to profitability. It doesn't matter if you buy your shares say $1 and gets diluted all the way to 1c incrementally over say 3yrs, so long as after a 5 or more years you end up selling at $10 per share. Or otherwise with sound IRR you make your capital investment back in dividends and then some, not care about the value of the shares themselves. Or the project/business flops and you lose part or all of your investment.

So it's really just part of a healthy system. Shorting is part of that system. Not some conspiracy systemic issue some like to espouse on the internet, mostly coming from America.

You should really be thanking the "shorters" if you're just acquiring CXO shares now. It's their loses that you're gaining afterall.

That "liquidity" I speak of allows you to buy or sell those particular shares at any given time. Imagine if you're trying to sell but no one willing to buy. At least in stocks with short positions, you'd know eventually someone will buy even if sell at a loss. I'd urge you to look at shares without that liquidity - once you buy, good luck selling. Usually in those circumstances the company goes bankrupt and you'd have shares worth nothing sitting in your portfolio for a couple of years until they magically disappear and wiped off the register. It's obvious you haven't experienced that before or even know it can happen hence confident in your opinion that shorters are mere parasites but trust me, without shorters ASX market would be stuffed, unbalanced and would not have survived a shock, much like the volatility caused by Covid.

Good luck