My own opinion only, but to me, shorting, while legal, is immoral. It's not "investing" at all, and all the specious arguments about "providing balance" or "providing liquidity" is all just so much rubbish.
It's trading, not investing, for a start. And secondly, it's selling something you don't own.
It's like me saying to you - oh, I sold your house last week, but don't worry, I bought it back again after I'd talked the price down by mentioning the awful neighbours and spread a rumour about a new bypass going through there. I made a quick $100k profit by selling your house, but here, you can have it back again, and here's $5k for the trouble.
To me, short-selling is a totally contrived maneouvre that is designed to make a profit from someone lese's losses. It is not about investing in a company at all. In fact, short term trading in general is nothing to do with investing, but I realize that it's a valid tool to make money, just like trading cars but not owning one for the longer term. But at least, short term trading means you're selling shares that you own, that you have bought, even if only for a few minutes.
But short-selling is a scam, pure and simple. It is a mechanism dreamed up by Wall Street whiz kids aimed purely at wangling the market to make money from something you don't own.
And even short selling has become corrupted since the advent of algorithmic and high-frequency trading. Originally, short selling was done if you thought or gambled that a share price MAY go down. But these days, the price can be MADE to go down via the walk-down trades of the bots and HFT, not to mention rumourtrage. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shorting stinks, in my 'umble opinion, and there needs to be more investing rather than rapid-fire trading. It's not a stock market - it's a casino these days.
End of rant...!
Expand
(20min delay)