I know I am one of the people who speaks about shorting, often but I agree with what you've written here. It may have some impact but it doesn't explain the 12-18 month disconnect from share price performance and the value creation the business has done in that time period so to blame shorting doesn't make sense and I agree with that.
The thing that does seem odd is the amount of turnover (volume) generated. We're a 1.5b market cap company with reasonable shares on issue (125m~), but a single broker/group has generated 78m shares worth of volume of stock in just the last 12 months? Is that considered normal? if we look at the top 5 net sellers who are all US investment banks they've traded 176m shares between themselves and we only have 125m shares on issue. I know they are trading back and forth but they need a reasonable pool of shares to begin with surely?
Maybe that's the case for everything in the indexes and it's just a constant back and forth of computer based trading and rebalancing activities.
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