In a civilised society we donāt get to take the law into our own hands, whether or not we may empathise with the situation. This is not what is commonly thought of as good behaviour, regardless of the circumstances surrounding. Where would we draw the line if so?
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My own life, the life of children, the life of elderly people, the life of those who canāt defend themselves are off limits. No piece of paper with printed ink has any value in comparison in my view.
Principles are guidelines, not chains.
I think we ought to abide ourselves by sound principles and at the same time have a practical mindset that can allow us to adapt to the circumstances.
Principles alone lead to fundamentalist stances I believe.
But this is way off topic and has no place in this platform.
Back to short selling please
Iām inclined to agree with you here.
(Sorry if this has been pointed out already, but this shitty infinite scroll makes it harder to read posts.)
The ādefinitionā in the OP is incomplete.
Short selling is the sale of a security that is not owned by the seller or that the seller has borrowed. Short selling is motivated by the belief that a securityās price will decline, enabling it to be bought back at a lower price to make a profit.
Definition from Investopedia .
It omits hedging - genuine hedging.
Insuring oneās existing position by selling futures or buying a Put option is quite reasonable.
It should also be reasonable to (say):
- buy Tesco
- sell Sainsburys
This is taking a view on the relative merits of two similar assets - while being indifferent to the general market.
Short-selling becomes a problem when it is ānakedā - and when it exceeds the āfloatā in the market.
The best defence against naked short-selling is full transparencyā¦
(so the more aggressive bar-stewards can be stuffed !)
ā¦maybe alongside rules around extended settlement dates.
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There appears to be a lot of pushback against investing in crypto currencies on the Freetrade forums, yet all Freetrade users have the ability to purchase shares in the Invesco Global Blockchain ETF. Surely if you believe that crypto is worthless and speculative and not backed by anything of value then shorting that would allow you to generate income from your held beliefs.
The same goes for standard stocks, if I believe TSLA is overvalued and not worth the price itās currently being traded that then I should be allowed to put my money where my mouth is and short TSLA, thus allowing the share price to fall and find its true value.
I hold some cryptos, I would like to hedge this by shorting a crypto ETF. This would lower my downside risk.
You obviously have a different option on investing but that doesnāt mean you have to short stocks if the option is made available on FT.
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Still, the potential loss of shorting is infinite. Just enabling a feature like that would go horribly wrong in a lot of cases. I wouldnāt want to bear these financial and reputational risks as a company. Itās just not worth it.
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Hi @TestAccount you appear to be new around here so welcome to the forum 
FT operate in a different way to other brokers. The primary revenue for some brokers is on a per trade basis while others look to profit from more exotic financial instruments (76% of T212 loose money when trading CFDās). FT has been built on a freemium model for long term relationships with user paying for FT+ or an ISA, if they opened up short selling or other more complex / volatile instruments they risk people losing money and cancelling their subscription.