Schwab won't let you, because even if you're 95% right, you'll still probably lose 95% of your money...
It's quite difficult to be 100% right...
The risk of a stock like spaceX gapping up 10x in an instant is virtually zero.
And if you are buying an instrument where you can lose more than you invested, the approach maybe wrong? :-)
This is precisely why shorting can lose more than you "invest", because you're not buying an instrument, you're selling it with the intent (or promise, depending on what kind of instrument it is) to buy it back later, hopefully at a lower price.
The risk is unbounded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(finance)
There are, as said, depending on juristic regime, products which do not let you lose more than you invested.
On top of this comes national regulation: E.g. in some EU countries, retail traders are exempt from s.c. "margin calls" and the broker is required by regulation to "just close and not ask for more"
Source: Im living in one of these EU countries
> the broker is required by regulation to "just close and not ask for more"
Some American brokers will also forcibly close your position instead of issuing a margin call. Do you mean that under those national regulations, the broker is required to eat the losses?
[0]: in quotes, since with a short position it's not really the case that you put something in.
The loss is implemented by a knockout value, depending on your leverage. In all EU countries there is no margin call allowed for retailers, but this is not relevant for turbos anyway. The loss is included in the deprecation of the price of the turbo, the issuer is just the middleman, being neutral. Compared to a CFD issuer, which can print whatever price it wants. With a turbo, the price of the turbo instrument is connected by a simple formula with the underlying price.
A turbo has an ISIN, and is highly regulated by the Financial Supervision Authorities.
Actually, turbos are a professoinal instrument but they are sold to retailers as well in most countries.
But nontheless, you as instrument user pay something, for sure.
a company who says we'll have ai in space, meanwhile you can stick ai in the ocean and use ocean water to cool & still have access for upgrade cycles.
meanwhile china and japan and bezos all landing reusable rockets.
meanwhile maybe ai runs locally on phones (today's announcement of deepseek in the iphone in china)
ummmm. short in force!
there are easier ways to make money than betting against Elon Musk. See Tesla and how well it worked out for short sellers there.
I like SpaceX as a company (especially Starlink) but it's over valued in my opinion. In about a year when there's a little bit of public financial history and the dilution is over i'll probably buy in.
Note this has nothing to do with my feelings about SpaceX. I am Elon hater nr. 1 and hope SpaceX burns to dust, I only hope speculative investors burn down with it.
EDIT/CLARIFICATION: This post is fundamentally anti-capitalist. You may feel like I am mis-informed or misunderstanding. I am both of theses things if and only if Capitalism truly is self-evident.
My parent wanted to make some unearned money by making speculations and gambles. If they were allowed and if they were successful, they would have made a bunch of money while contributing nothing. Every single dollar they would have made in their speculative gamble would have come from somebody else who actually contributed and but didn’t get the full value from their work.
I am glad that my parent was denied the privileged to participate in this systematic exploitation. The ideal number of speculative investors is zero, and any movement towards that number is an improvement for workers.
You feel a stock is overvalued and you short it. You feel a stock is undervalued and you buy it. What's the difference?
Yeah, I know why people _want to_ (betting), but it doesn't serve a broader economic purpose.
I agree that hedging is real and useful. The comment I’m replying to isn’t trying to do that.
You’re not going to make up a silly low number because you actually have to buy the bananas yourself at some point, and you help price discovery because now that guy isn’t buying bananas at a higher price than someone is willing to sell them for.
What I'm getting at is when does it go from investing, "I think this entity is going to take my money and use it to build a profitable factory that will then return to me a share of the profits", to just gambling "I think this stock price will change by the end of the day and I'm going to bet on it", and what are the positives and negatives of that?
The distinction between investing vs gambling and positives and negatives sounds like more the subject of a PhD thesis than an HN comment! At some point the marginal benefit of smaller price spreads from very short term trade to actually allocating physical capital and labour to producing more valuable stuff might actually be lower than the amount it simply inflates asset prices, but that is much closer to microseconds than "you're not allowed to bet against this IPO, the insiders artificially pumping its value need to be able to cash out first"...
Producers that use commodity futures to lock in a sale price need a buyer or speculator to take the other side of the transaction.
(under the assumption your broker is managing their risk if your losses from a short position potentially exceeds capital available for liquidation if the trade moves against you)
Elon Musk is politicized so you're going to have people wanting to short against him, for reasons other than it being seen as a rational and sound investment strategy. This is one reason brokers tend to restrict this activity to certain types of investors who are more able to appreciate the risks, to say nothing of baseline necessities like needing a margin account to cover potential losses. Shorting is just very different than buying a stock.
It’s all betting.
If someone wants to dress it up in jargon or talk about beneficial second order effects, they can. But if putting money on an outcome you can’t control isn’t gambling, I don’t know what is.
Plus there's option traders who naturally need to go short sometimes.
Lots of replies either personally benefit or just assume the "way things are" is the best, but the stock market has gotten highly abstracted from the original intention of providing capital to grow companies via means other than bank loans.
I get the argument that shorts and friends help make the price the stock is being sold at more accurate, and I believe there's some truth there, but also we constantly see stock prices fluctuate by 10+% in a single day and I have trouble believing the actual value of all these companies changed that much in a single 24 period.
None of us have that crystal ball, so market participants try to guess at the future. It's not difficult to believe that those guesses can swing a lot in a single day. Just trying to figure out whether or the Hormuz will be open next week can give you whiplash.
its a reasonable expectation that 3 months after an IPO the price will be lower than it was at IPO
not really a bet so much as that on average the prices at IPO are a local maxima