Spittrader2, Galvanise is correct. The ASX short list only...

Spittrader2, Galvanise is correct. The ASX short list only covers naked shorting. There has been a whole forest consumed from the amount of paper written on this topic this year.

Covered shorting = borrowing a stock and selling it. Covered shorting is not disclosed, i.e. joe public does not know how much of a company's stock is lent and of that how much is then sold. The information on covered shorting is available to large institutions for a price. Some agency, whose name I forget, collects the info and sells it. The ASX itself has acknowldged on a few occasions earlier that it does not regulate this part of the market and has no idea of the extent of it. It tried to call a few into line at about the time of Opes Crime but it was clear that lenders had different interpretations so the ASX and ASIC went to the government to get legislation clarified or tightened.

Naked shorting = selling stock you don't have and have not borrowed and then have to either borrow it (after you have sold it) or buy it back (on the same day). Either way you have to settle in T3 so if you buy it back that means to settle you have to buy back on the same day eg. sell in the morning, buy in the arvo. This is what the official ASX list reports and is really only a fraction of the total shorting. How do I know that given that I said covered shorting info is not available? Because during the Opes collapse the topic was covered ad nauseum and said providers of covered shorting data produced some for journos.

You don't need CFDs to short a stock. You can do naked shorting with comsec FFS.