Is anyone else following the Citron short seller vs WallStreetBets chaos?

Bear in mind that lots of Citronā€™s early shorts were basically discovering cases of straight up fraud. They expended resources to research that fraud which ultimately made markets more efficient as this information was shared. So the argument that they can help with price discovery is compelling.

Itā€™s hard to picture what a world of purely long-only funds would look like, but it feels like it would be quite problematic. Maybe shorts bring more problems than they solve, but they do still bring advantages.

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Not on the warpath here but find that assertion interesting, precisely because I canā€™t think of a single reason why long only positions is in any way problematic? Why do you think otherwise?

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I thought the anger at Citron was basically that he set his shorts, announced his report that a company was overvalued, then profited on the dip caused by his report.
Same with Hindenburg doing that expose of Nikolaā€™s fraud (gravity powered truck), it was great to expose it but it felt a bit dirty that they went short before releasing it (and its gone back up now :joy:).
Shorts are fine in principle but if youā€™re causing the dip its morally ambiguous.

Shorting is neither bad nor good.

Committing fraud is bad.

Management that cook the books to paint a rosier picture of their accounts are bad. That is fraud. That is market manipulation.

How are we going to find fraud in the accounts? By fundamental analysis.

When someone puts time and effort in going through the books and finds fraudulent reporting how can s/he profit from it? By placing a short sell.

Short sellers play a very important role. And I appreciate it. They donā€™t short the companies with solid fundamentals, solid competitive advantage and solid future prospects. If those people canā€™t make money by finding fraud through fundamental analysis they will stop doing it. And then some managers without integrity will reign supreme and fill their pockets at the expense of shareholders even when they belong in jail for committing fraud. How would you like that?

Committing fraud is bad.

What I donā€™t appreciate is abusive behaviours. Both on the long and the short side.

And if we have abusive behaviours on the long side, by means of fraudulent accounting practices, we can also find abusive behaviours on the short side. GME is just an eloquent example of it.

In the very specific case of the GME short sell, short sellers placed shorts of close to 140% of shares floating in the stock exchange.

They did it to create a downward spiral of the stock price with the goal of causing the bankruptcy of the company and pocket the profit. With the company bankrupt they wouldnā€™t even have to buy the stock because it would be worth zero.

But they got caught while doing it. They got caught by someone who did fundamental analysis and saw that the numbers didnā€™t add up, and saw an opportunity to make money. This person then shares the information and along came people who also see an opportunity to make money by squeezing the shorts. And also came along people who saw an opportunity to stick the free marketā€™s invisible hand up Wall Streetā€™s sfincter.

I think these particular short sellers, and I canā€™t emphasize enough these specific short sellers, tried to manipulate the market by means of overshorting and got caught in the process. I think this is fraud.

And now people with different motivations are together trying to either profit from it or teach them a lesson. I bet thereā€™s even Hedge Funds betting along side the squeezers.

Iā€™m in it for the money, but most of all to contribute to the end of overshorting. I hope a situation like this never happens again.

Market makers and other financial institutions are now trying to avoid getting caught up in the middle of the cross fire. The bill will show up eventually and someone will have to pay it.

Many retail investors will loose money if the squeeze is over and the price of the stock goes back to its fundamental value. And that will be sad. It might be insane to enter into a long position in GME at the current price.

But maybe the squeeze is just in the beginning. And Iā€™m not saying that it is. That scenario may bring an abundance of bankruptcies in the financial sector. I feel no sympathy for them. But the price may reach levels that could cause a crash of the overall market. And that could cause many retail investors to panic sell everything, while creating yet more buying opportunities.

It might be insane to enter into a short position in GME at this price level. Who knows?!

I donā€™t think this will end well. And all because overshorting was in place. And found.

I hope short sellers may be understood for the good service they provide. And abusers, manipulative and/or fraudulent participants may rot in jail. After getting bankrupt

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Feel free to correct me if iā€™m wrong, but is it not the job of auditors to see if the books are being cooked and finding fraudulent reports? If thats the case, then surely no need for short selling?

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Wasnā€™t Enron audited?

Wasnā€™t Bernie Madoff audited?

Edit: time to go to sleep now

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good shout lol guess it all comes down to corruption

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Bring on tomorrow I canā€™t wait!

Whilst I agree with Raul, I hope this goā€™s as WSB planā€™s and some serious regulation is brought in to stop this from being abused like it is in the future.

Itā€™s good to see them get their hands slapped.

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A world with only long-only funds would have less efficient markets (in terms of liquidity and price discovery)

If the only way to be compensated was by finding good news then all research would be focused on that. If you can be compensated for finding bad news (by shorting then disclosing the information) then there is an incentive to look for bad news (beyond DD on your existing longs).

Hereā€™s are summary article on hedge funds, on P25 it looks at short selling and price discovery and it cites a couple of papers that investigated the effects of historic bans on short selling:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e878/79d42b50b8b0efcfac28883a85e1bd4a8c43.pdf

Beber and Pagano (2011) examine the consequences of short-sale bans around the world during the 2007-2009 crisis. They find that bans had negative effects on liquidity, especially for small cap stocks and stocks without listed options. Moreover, they find that the bans slowed down price discovery, especially in bear markets and failed to support prices in the vast majority of markets

Also a summary of another paper:

The authors find that, through the period of the ban, markets for financial stocks were substantially less efficient and that the role of the trading process aiding in price discovery was greatly reduced.

Auditors arenā€™t as heavily incentivised to find fraud, itā€™s clear in the past they have avoided disclosing it either through negligence / bad incentives. Shorts are always incentivised to disclose fraud.

I really donā€™t think the evidence supports an argument to ban short selling entirely, although that doesnā€™t preclude further regulation.

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Check out the WallStreetBets Reddit thread. I doubt very much this is over just yet. Justin Sun has claimed to take a $1m long position on Friday (I think that was the date off the top of my head).

Appreciate the insight, and will definitely check out the papers youā€™ve linked there.

I guess what doesnā€™t sit right with me, how one can sell something they donā€™t own. Further regulation and accountability sounds like the right answer, but not sure what that would like.

Thanks @Cameron

I hope short selling is not banned, nor over regulated. Maybe all it takes to prevent overshorting in the future is for a stand to happen. That stand might be the GME squeeze if it causes so much damage that it gets printed with fire in everyoneā€™s memory.

It might lead to regulatory intervention. But how could that work?! As far as Iā€™m aware naked shorts are illegal, yet some geniuses managed to over-short a stock in a process that some call counterfeit stock scheme and regulators didnā€™t notice. Private investors did.

Maybe Chamath Palihapitiya is right when he calls for daily full transparency on the sizes of short positions. According to his argument if every long mutual fund has to disclose their long positions on a daily basisā€¦ Because transparency

Retail investors will be keeping an eye on the list of shorts now, just as they have this week with all the non-GME memes. Then its up to the hedge funds if they want to risk it.

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It happens all the time, thatā€™s what contracts are for - committing to a future obligation that you canā€™t immediately fulfil. Contract law gives people faith in those obligations and has enabled non-trivial transactions that are very important.

Derivatives such as futures and options involve selling something you donā€™t own.

Developers sell houses that they havenā€™t built yet.

People can pre-order a whole range of consumer products.

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Lance Armstrong was caught after a campaign by a few journalists- you donā€™t need to be able to make millions of dollars to be able to hold people to account and for people to call out cheating / fraud.

The financial markets will tell you that itā€™s different and theyā€™re special. I donā€™t buy it, sorry. As we mature into the Information Age where I have access to more information on my smartphone than a Wall Street broker had 10/15 years ago this kind of behaviour belongs in the past.

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I agree it should be more public, but this information (short interest) is already available to everyone with a Bloomberg terminal.

Itā€™s crazy that so many conspiracies persisted about institutions not closing short positions for so long when hundreds of thousands of people can literally look up this information in seconds.

David Walsh, Armstrongā€™s journalist nemesis, has made an entire career out of exposing Armstrong. Yes, there was an ethical motive there to keep the yellow jersey to those who deserve it, etc but I doubt weā€™d have heard of the Tour de france doping scandal if journalists had to do it all for free.

The same goes for the Boston Globe when it came to exposing widespread paedophelia in the Catholic Church, or Lawyer Rob Bilott when it came to suing the DuPont company for poisoning thousands. Clearly an ethical motive in there, but the financial motive plays an important part. I donā€™t think thereā€™s anything wrong with that, if you work hard enough to expose wrongdoing on these kind of scales you deserve a payday in my view.

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And thatā€™s basically the entire premise of The Big Short, which is one of the 3 films that forms the entire financial education for most of WSBā€™s subs.

People love the film which depicts a massive bubble growing in an asset class that canā€™t be shorted until Burry creates an instrument that enables shorting, which in turn is used to incentivise hedge funds to research the mortgage bubble and ultimately correct prices.

Yet now they hate it?

Obviously the real answer is that views havenā€™t changed, the people have. Iā€™m sure 90% of wsb would support short selling 1 year ago, yet now they make up 10% of the current subscribers.

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Donā€™t have access to a Bloomberg terminal. Only have access to a Google terminal

Some institutions opened new positions while overlooking the short to float ratio. Maybe thatā€™s common practice, but itā€™s the seed, root and stem of the current problem. Maybe it wouldnā€™t have became a problem with the potential to obliterate the entire system if it wasnā€™t noticed. But it was. And Iā€™m glad it was.

I believe itā€™s wrong to sell more stuff than what you have available.

Of course one can argue that airlines overbook flights because more often than not thereā€™s people loosing their flights and that way with overbooking more people have the chance to be served. But there are also times when thereā€™s 2 people with a ticket for the same seat. Thereā€™s no way to create extra seats on the spot. And one is asked to leave the flight and wait for the next one. I think this is wrong. I think this should be obscenely compensated for the troubles causedā€¦

With overshortings thereā€™s a potential twist though. Management of the overshorted company could issue new shares to raise capital in an opportunistic move.

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Funny you mention

I feel like that character right now. But now on the opposite side of the tradeā€¦ and tell to myself ā€œOkā€¦ buy itā€ā€¦ but these prices are insane and one day they will free fall. Hope everybody realises that

Edit2: time to go to work

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Yeah and to be honest now this has happened I imagine market forces are going to prevent it happening again (no one wants to be the next loser). That said further regulation may also help.

Some people have just taken the argument against shorting to extremes. When cars crash we regulate for safety, not banning cars.

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