Short Selling
- January 27, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Short Selling
Subject : Economy
Section: Money market
Concept :
- Short seller Hindenburg Research on January 25 disclosed short positions in Adani Group, alleging stock manipulation and accounting fraud in its latest investigative report.
What is Short Selling?
- Short-selling allows investors to book profit from stocks or other securities when they go down in value.
- In order to do a short sale, an investor has to borrow the stock or security through their brokerage company from someone who owns it.
- The investor then sells the stock, retaining the cash
- The short-seller hopes that the price will fall over time, providing an opportunity to buy back the stock at a lower price than the original sale price.
- Any money left over after buying back the stock is profit to the short-seller.
How short-selling works?
- Most investors own stocks, funds, and other investments that they want to see rise in value.
- Over time, the stock market has generally gone up, albeit with temporary periods of downward movement along the way.
- For long-term investors, owning stocks has been a much better than short-selling the entire stock market.
- Sometimes, though, you’ll find an investment that you’re convinced will drop in the short term (as in case of COVID 19 outbreak).
- In those cases, short-selling can be the easiest way to profit from the misfortunes that a company is experiencing.
- Even though short-selling is more complicated than simply going out and buying a stock, it can allow making money when others are seeing their investment portfolios shrink.
Risks of short-selling
- Short-selling can be profitable when one makes the right call, but it carries greater risks than what ordinary stock investors experience.
- When we buy a stock, the most we can lose is what you pay for it.
- If the stock goes to zero, we suffer a complete loss, but will never lose more than that.
- By contrast, if the stock soars, there’s no limit to the profits one can enjoy. With a short sale, however, that dynamic is reversed.