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Comment by MperorM | Hacker News Reader

why is shorting a company perverted? I would argue it's a great asset to society.

Eg. those who shorted stock because they expected covid-19 to cause a market dip, sent a giant signal to the entire world that covid was going to be a big problem.

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If you are short a company then you benefit from harming it. In the example you provide, the short seller could benefit by exacerbating covid, by sabotaging the response. I'm not saying I'm definitely against all forms of shorting because of this, but that is one drawback at the least.

if you are long a company then you benefit from helping it. For example, lobbying to dismantle environmental regulations to increase the value of your fossil fuel stocks

You also benefit from harming its competitors.

This is the same argument often made against prediction markets. I remain unconvinced this is a significant issue, but I'm always open to changing my mind :)

It certainly opens up the door to malicious information asymmetries and pr campaigns.

Yeah that's right.

I am somewhat torn on where to stand on this. On one hand I do see why we would want regulation against insider trading & pump and dumps, on the other hand I worry that regulation isn't preventing either, and society quickly would become inoculated if we legalized it.

When I read Robin Hanson's paper on insider trading and prediction markets, I became much more uncertain about whether we should regulate this area than I used to be.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228340813_Insider_T...

I'd rather we just enact capital gains taxes to lower the overall incentive of financial wizardry to begin with. Force prices of assets back to the value of their dividends. Make it painful to be a growth stock unless your case for valuable future dividends is really compelling.

As does going long. Your classic pump-and-dump scheme has led to thousands of disinformation campaigns that don't require shorting at all.

On some level shorting is worse though. A pump and dump scheme hurts investors. A shorting scheme can hurt investors and destroy the company.

Shorting can also help investors in the market at large if it helps bring down companies that are obvious scams. Some short seller reports have pretty famously destroyed companies that were up to no good, preventing further harm to future investors and boosting confidence in the valuations of the rest of the market. If there's no money in doing all of those short seller reports, then people won't do them, and the market will have less information available to it in total, and more frauds will continue to go under the radar.

Like what

Luckin Coffee, for example (massive valuation until it turned out a huge number of their sales were fraudulent. Exposed by short sellers). Enron also was in part brought to light by short sellers.

Enron is one of the most famous examples: https://www.finance-monthly.com/2017/10/the-top-10-greatest-...

This is the truth shortsellers are not just bad, like All Long buyers are not all good..

How does shorting destroy a company destroy it?

It could open a company to a hostile takeover, or cripple them if they were reliant on a realistic share price to raise necessary capital.

Shorting a company itself isn't so bad. Orchestrating bad PR to boost your short option earnings is bad.

> Orchestrating bad PR to boost your short option earnings is bad.

So legit question, lets flip this around. Lets pretend that I am super confident, and have strong evidence to believe, that company $ABC, currently trading at $100/share, has been committing fraud and is drastically over-valued because of it. Lets say, I don't know, it was intentionally skipping numbers during the day to give the appearance of higher volume[0]. I've determined this by investing a bunch of resources in research to determine that reported numbers don't line up with the actual number of customers, or don't line up with other available data from other sources.

So I take a short position. But I'm not allowed to say anything about it. I keep silent.

Now 3 years later, the fraud is uncovered elsewhere, I make a killing, and my only response is "Ya, I knew they were fraudulent years ago, and here is all of my proof. But I didn't say anything for 3 years."

Would you argue that I'm not complicit in that fraud for all the years I knew about it?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-29/luckin-co...

No? You're not complicit with fraud if you suspect someone of fraud but don't go public with your suspicions. I don't think that's up for debate at all tbh.

Huh? You think there's a duty to publicly call out mere suspicions of fraud? I would argue there's the opposite -- people are hesitant to go public with any accusations because of the very real threat of being sued for defamation/libel.

There are very few true obligations to report in the US. All I'm aware of are tied to specific occupations/licenses.

Nothing against shorting in principle, the OP and me were just referring to being able to "sell" more shares of a company than there are in existence...

How is that perverted? Shorting a stock is fundamentally no different than other types of debt.

Imagine an economy of 3 people, A, B and C.

A has $5.

B borrows $5 from A.

C borrows $5 from B.

A borrows $5 form C.

The economy started with $5 and $0 debt, the economy ends with $5 and $15 debt. Despite the fact that the society's total debt is now 300% the size of its economy, it is no different than how it started. Debt isn't inherently bad. Debt is a tool that allows us to collaborate.

That’s not mysterious or suspicious at all, it’s just a consequence of being able to lend something fungible. Very similar to how bank lending affects the supply of money.

That can only happen with naked shorting, which is (illegal and) not implied by >100% short interest.

Some of the short sales refer to the same shares; say there's one share in the company and it's (borrowed and) sold short thrice. The company's one share has been sold three times, but there haven't been sales of more shares than there are in the company - the three (short) sellers need to get that (same) one share back to close their position in sequence.

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