Agree that naked short selling as an illegal activity, should be...

Agree that naked short selling as an illegal activity, should be policed for all trades, not just for few identified ones. However, once someone is caught the fines for naked selling should be punitive - to ward off anyone else from being "courageous"!

My opinion is also that ALL short selling is wrong. There cannnot be a level playing field if one person, group or institution (or even a few of these) can create a condition that virtually guarantees their shortselling will be profitable. Just one example of this:

ABS was apparently short sold on a rumour that Eddie had a margin account with Opus Prime. Given that Eddie had a lot of shares on margin, a run on ABS could cause him some grief and (shorters rubbing their hands together) in turn the margin call/s could become public, therefore it would be inevitable that the ABS sp would suffer. All that was needed were a few good rumours, followed by some disclosure reporting and low and behold ABS would be "doomed" and the shorters would make a killing.

So, shorters make money from the demise of a coy, not from a coy building wealth for all its SH's! Of course, it could be argued that ABS was always going to have difficulties with its banks over loans, but this of course would only assist the shorters. Also, given that banks could also benefit from ABS's problems, i.e. join the crowd shorting ABS, it is clear that once the ball was rolling, ABS did not have much a chance, i.e., SH had no say or chance.

And please don't say that shorters have a right to trade as well as they are also taking risks. It seems to me, that in the ABS case, 1000's of shareholders, including Eddie, holding 95% of coy have more rights to a fair playing field, than the hundred or so shorters, some of which possibly held absolutely NONE of the coy's shares in the first place!

In addition, the current "system" of proclaiming the short trades 24 hours after they occur, is benefiting only the shorters. Investors (Ok, day traders too) working in realtime have no knowledge of the shorts until after the event. How can this be a level playing field? If you knew that a coy was being shorted (manipulation I call it!), why would you go long in it? Yep, we are mugs, the "system" allows a few to screw many, many others!