Not sure what you're getting at Dolce....plain vanilla shorting...

Not sure what you're getting at Dolce....plain vanilla shorting is when someone borrows stock, usually from a custodian company (and for a fee) and sells that stock on-market, buying back and returning the stock to the custodian in due course. With the advent of HFT or algorithmic trading, (and this is only a potted version) what tends to happen is that the market is flooded with irregular orders, both buy and sell, so that if a client was wanting to buy 20,000 shares, his broker may sell 100,000 shares but buy 120,000 shares over the course of the day's trading. This is what causes distortion of volumes and often gives a false impression of the actual underlying market. A very simplistic explanation but you may get what I'm trying to say!