Kinabalu

10 Financial Entities On the Brink

In the early '90s bank stocks hit their lows in mid 1990. It was about 2 years later that the charge-offs and reserves hit their highs. The shorts, like Shedlock, keep talking about all the bad things that are going to happen. They're right. But everybody knows it so it's already reflected in the stock prices. I think that the short financials strategy has seen most of its easy profit by now. It's going to get a lot harder to pick the losers from here on out.

SEC Shorting Restrictions: Are Some Banks Being Set Up?

"Who is missing?"

This is a typical SEC use of "moral suasion" rather than attacking a problem with prosecutorial zeal. The big financial institutions aren't where the problem short sellers are making their money. Those institutions have way too much float for the common short seller to move the market significantly. The big institutions just have more friends in high places to listen to their complaints and rationalizations about their stock prices.

The real problem is with the smaller financial institutions. Anyone with a short position can come on Seeking Alpha and publish an article replete with factual errors and poor research and find a big enough following to make a dent in the smaller institutions stock price. If the SEC would quit telling everyone they don't have enough manpower to police naked shorts and just do it they could eliminate most of the problem. A substantial portion of the stock shorted today is either naked or the same shares borrowed two or three times over.

Please note: Selling short by itself is not the problem. The problem is: 1) the people who propagate false information and rumors in order to profit from short sales; 2) selling short stock without having legitimately borrowed it first; and 3) investors who are long a stock held in a broker name need to realize that its not in their best interest to allow the broker to lend that stock to short sellers.