Posted by: eatyourshortsms
In reply to: None Date:9/28/2006 5:00:02 PM
Post #of 12996
Junior mining exploration companies are almost always attacked by naked short sellers. This is due to the statistical chance of one of these finding an economic deposit, namely about 1-in-100. The naked short sellers are aware of the statistics and are only playing the odds. Their attacks also create the steep odds. Wildcat oil drillers are treated the same way. Any company with a large % of Canadian shareholders (most mining companies) have a large naked short position due to the laxity of Canadian laws.
I have a friend who has written books about Naked short selling and short selling. There are very few ways to really beat it. If you catch them off guard with massive volume buying started by a big announcement you may cause a short squeeze. Sometimes the company paying a dividend to shareholders can help but I have seen this tactic not work. One of the best ways is for the major holders to pay a small fee and have their electronic shares turned into actual paper certificates. This cost a small fee. Try doing this and see how much grief you get from your broker and how many excuses and delays they will come up with. There are many of you holding in the millions of shares. If you have a million or more doing this will cause those shorting this thing to crap their pants or in this case their shorts.
For more understanding continue and you will see what I mean;
• Stock lending is exclusively an activity used by short sellers, who must borrow stock before selling it.
• Short selling is a bet on stock price declines. The short seller borrows stock, and then sells that borrowed stock, hoping to buy it back at a lower price later, when he returns it to the lender.
• Illegal “naked short selling” involves placing a sales transaction, but not borrowing the stock, and simply failing to deliver it on delivery day. It is also called “failing to deliver” or FTD – or delivery failure.
• Delivery failure is a significant problem nowadays, as it can be used to run stock prices down in a manipulative manner. Delivery failure in any other industry is called fraud. Hedge funds are the biggest culprits in this illegal trading strategy, with broker/dealers right behind them in the culpability queue.
• Hedge funds are now the largest players in the US equities markets, representing the majority of trading, with almost $2 trillion under management.
• Hedge funds are large, virtually unregulated pools of anonymous money, used to invest in any way the operator sees fit.
• Prime brokers allow their hedge fund customers leverage on their assets, meaning that for every dollar of asset, they could easily hold $10 of short positions.
• This over-leverage presents a systemic risk should positions in several larger funds go the wrong way, as there isn’t enough collateral to cover the domino effect of multiple positions being forced to cover.
• This over-leverage creates an environment where the brokers are now pregnant with their hedge fund customers’ liabilities, and have a vested interest in seeing depressed stock prices remain depressed – if the stocks go up, the hedge funds could easily fail, and the brokers are on the hook to buy-in and deliver the stock owed by the funds – resulting in brokerage failures.
• The DTCC is ultimately at risk for this domino effect, as brokerages fail.
• The DTCC is owned by the brokers, thus is the brokers.
• The DTCC processes over $1.2 quadrillion (million trillion) every year, and owns most of the stock American investors hold in their accounts - but most of the country has never heard of the company. The total GNP of the planet is about $20 trillion per year.
• 1% of all trades in dollar volume fail to settle (be delivered) every day, per the SEC.
• $130 billion to $150 billion of equities trade every day.
• $2 trillion of total trades are processed by the DTCC every day, including bonds.
• The SEC does not qualify whether they refer to total trades, or total equities, when referring to 1% failing to settle.
• The SEC keeps the total dollar value of trades that have failed to be delivered secret.
• The SEC “grandfathered” all failed to deliver trades prior to January, 2005, effectively pardoning all those trades (for which money was paid but no stock ever delivered), from ever being required to deliver. This amounts to allowing those that violated delivery rules to keep the money from their illegal conduct.
• The SEC keeps the number of shares grandfathered, as well as the dollar amount, secret, for fear of creating market disrupting “volatility”.
• The above numbers do not take into account the large number of undelivered trades that are handled “Ex-Clearing” – a way of handling delivery outside the system.
• Many securities scholars believe the “Ex-Clearing” failure problem is 10 times larger than the in-system problem the above numbers represent.
• Many investors that think they have “shares” in their brokerage accounts, don’t. They have “markers” that have no underlying share to validate them. Some call these “counterfeit shares”, with good reason.
• The DTCC, via Cede & Co., is the registered owner of all shares held in "Street Name," which are all shares in margin accounts.
• Margin accounts represent the bulk of independent investor account types.
• Registered owners are free to use their “property” as collateral for loans or debt.
• It is unknown what, if any, loans or debts are collateralized by the stock “owned” by the DTCC.
• The DTCC’s “Stock Borrow Program” lends shares to be delivered to buyers, if sellers fail to deliver.
• The Stock Borrow Program is operated on the honor system, and is anonymous.
• It allows one genuine share to be lent multiple times, leaving a string of markers/IOUs in the share’s wake.
• This creates a systemic risk for the stock market, as more markers are in investor accounts, falsely represented as shares, than shares actually authorized by the companies.
• These markers are freely traded and treated by the system as real, resulting in a large secondary market of counterfeit shares – resulting in depressed stock prices.
• With paper certificates being eliminated – by the DTCC – there is no way to confirm that a share is genuine, versus a bogus marker.
• Only a handful of people on the planet understand all this.
• In the end, it is simple – Wall Street is printing shares electronically, investors are paying real money for those bogus shares, and the whole thing is predicated on the idea that few will ever understand what is being done, or bother to check.
