Trend Exploration Inc (TRDX)

[TJG]

Gainer this is a public post just using your post as a springboard for how shorts really work in this day and age.

In all my years of trading and in particular trading the OTC I have always been amazed at how many people have no real idea how shorting works...who shorts and how to tell when a short is happening or where to actually get the OFFICIAL short numbers.

People go to the OTC and read their numbers..they get daily short reports and see numbers and then think those numbers actually represent the real shorts.

But if some of the folks here did as much Due Diligence on shorts as they do on the stock they would be a lot better off.

Forget about the fact that penny stock can not be shorted, MM can sell shares they dont have, i.e short a stock, but Joe Blow on the street can not short pennys...you can not call a broker and ask them to short TRDX... only in Canada or off shore can that happen... but most important is learning how to read a short report and understand it.

About 15 years ago on line brokers came about, people sitting at home began to trade stocks on line and when they did it created a very big misconception of how to understand actual shorting vs perceived shorting. Electronic trading threw a monkey wrench into the numbers and here is why.

The SEC used to have a 72 hour settlement time frame on trades, its now 48, but it worked like this, Billy Bob sells a stock from his Etrade account and Bufford buys that stock from his Ameritrade account. Because we are dealing with the electronic day and age, the stock is gone from Billy's account and shows up into Buffords in a matter of minutes.

But no matter how fast they symbol gets there and the money is removed from one account and put into the other, it still takes 48 to 72 hours to clear that trade. If a person has margin trading he can use the money right away, if he does not he has to wait for it to clear. Think about how many time a day someone posts on a stock board that they are going to buy shares just as soon as their funds clear... thats the waiting period holding them back.

But the SEC says that until a stock certificate goes from Etrade to TDAmeritrade that stock is considered short...short because the trade has not actually closed until the cert gets there. The only time a trade does not fall into this electronic short is when the seller and the buyer are using the same broker. If Billy sells to Bufford and they both use Etrade then the cert is there and its cleared...if they dont then for 48 to 72 hours that trade is a short trade as far as everyone is concerned...but its not a actual short by definition of shorting a stock.

There is only one place where you can see the actual electronic short numbers for OTC stocks...and its on the FINRA site. This link will take you there, it will show you how many actual shares have been shorted and most of them are done by Market Makers and they cover the shorts on time.

When you click on the link look for the equity short and then type in TRDX...there are a whopping 10,000 actual shares that have been shorted on this.. the previous number was only 19,000 so the shorting by standards is very little, almost nil.

https://otce.finra.org/otce/equityShortInterest

All of our selling is simply Retail and if anyone tells you different, they are just not educated on how actual shorting works...