I have read hundreds of posts on this board about shorting ACTC, so I would like to also comment on this topic in relation to ACTC.
First up you need to understand that no ordinary individual investor is going to be able to short ACTC while it remains an OTC penny stock. The reason I say this is because trading houses require you to have covering funds if you want to short any stock, just in the same way you need covering securities to utilize a margin account, and that requirement means a minimum $3 or $5 PER SHARE cover as standard (depending on which trading house you use.. it usually corresponds to the same minimum $ value they use for margin trading).
That means for ACTC for an ordinary individual investor, for every single share you want to short at say $0.06 pps, you would need at least $3 or $5 in cash or securities to cover it, and those funds or securities would be held so you could not use them until you close your short position. For example, if you wanted to short say 500,000 ACTC shares at $0.06 which is a total short of $30,000, you would need $1.5-$2.5m in cash and/or securities to secure it..
Clearly the cost of shorting for an average investor is going to be unreachable, or in the case of an individual who does have millions in cash and/or cash equivalents, it's not going to be cost-effective tying up that amount of money for such a comparatively small short position. Besides the huge risk involved, that's why most trading houses will just say 'no' to shorting ACTC or similar OTC penny stocks... even though technically they can do it if you have multiple millions of dollars sitting there to cover it... but again, the cost to cover it is so high, you'd be better off to day trade blue chips with that cash than have it tied up covering a piddly penny short... heck, even the dividends on some stocks with that sort of money would make better sense.
The only people who can short this effectively are mm's who at times will go hog wild naked shorting in this wild west of the investment world... basically because they don't really answer to anyone and they decide themselves to allow the short position.
There is one positive side to ACTC being shorted and ACTC management remaining quiet though; when management one day (hopefully) halt trading to unexpectedly announce uplist, those shorts are going to have to cover immediately, and the naked shorters in particular are going to find themselves in a deep pile of doo-doo, because you can't play fast and loose like that on the bigger boards, and all existing positions have to be closed when ACTC transitions to a different exchange. It is this fact that may cause this stock to explode far beyond what is warranted if an uplist is announced unexpectedly, as long as everyone doesn't dump too soon on the run up and thereby provide the shares the naked shorters require to cover their positions.
So there you go, clearly on-topic with ACTC and many discussions on shorting ACTC that have been going on here for a long long time.
