Short Selling And Short Interest Ratios Shocking Secret
Posted in Forex on 03/12/2010 03:32 am by Ahmad HassamEveryone wants to ride the rising tide in the stock market by buying stocks and later on selling them at a higher price to make a capital gain. However, can you make money when the tide in the stock market is going down? Yes, you can with short selling. In short selling, yo borrow a stock from your broker and sell it. Later on you buy it back at a much lower price and return it your broker making a good capital gain.
Now, when you go short and the market suddenly turns against you in the sense that it goes in the wrong direction, you are in trouble. You want to buy back the stock but the price is continously going up. The harder it becomes to buy back the required number of shares, the more desperate you will become and the higher the prices can go before you are able to buy back the required number of shares and return them to your broker. So in a way, short selling is tricky and must only be practiced by the experienced traders. Now for short selling to work, the stock price should go down otherwize, you will make a hefty loss in case the stock price starts to go up. Since, you are trading with a borrowed stock, you have to return that stock to your broker. In case the stock price goes up, you will have to buy it back at a much higher price with a loss.
In case of futures or options, you don’t need to borrow the security; you simply agree to sell the contract when you go short. Why do investors take a short position? The most obvious reason is that they are expecting the price to go down further. Short selling is also used for hedging purposes.
There is something very important that you need to keep an eye on when you go short selling. It is known as Short Interest Ratios. New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ, both report the short interest in stocks listed on them,however, this is done on a monthly basis as brokers need sometime to collect the data of shares that they have lended to their clients for shorting. This will help you monitor the rate of short selling in the market. If the rate is too high, it means that too many investors are taking short positions and you need to avoid it.
Now this number is known as the Short Interest Ratio. Short Interest Ratio is a very important number for short sellers as it can give important clues about the investor expectation to the short sellers.
Short Interest Ratio reports the number of shares of a particular stock that has been shorted, the percentage change from the previous months, the average daily volume for that stock in the same month and the number of days of trading at the average volume that it would take to cover the short positions.
The problem with Short Interest Ratio is that it is not calculated frequently. It is calculated on monthly basis. So, the trader cannot use it to gauge the short positions in the market on a daily or weekly basis. However, it can give you the general trend in the market. A high short interest ratio should make you nervous if you have taken a short position in that stock as most of the investors who are short will soon become desperate to dump that stock in the market and cover their short positions.
Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done masters from Harvard University. Read this 49 page Quantum Swing Trading FREE Report. Get your FREE COPIES of the HVMM Ultimate Day Trading System and the Universal Risk & Money Management Tool.