InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[hock1]

AMC...glad you brought this up. I have, in many ways, tried to impress upon the members of this board, the unfair bias that short sellers and manipulators have in today's market.


Badger, I agree with you - longs are always on, always long (at least I am: ) whereas the apparent "wave" of shorted shares, even in the face of a short term price appreciation, seem to almost always precipitate an oncoming decline in SP....almost as if they are that much more the savvy or "in the know" if you will.....just my thought anyway

I'll try again: the main reason that the above phenomenon occurs is because when a long purchases a stock, the money for that purchase has to be delivered within 3 days. It does not matter if the long decides to sell the stock (even at a profit). The money for the original purchase still has to be delivered to the broker. If a short or someone who wants to contain the stock price sells shares that have not been identified and/or borrowed, they can repurchase those shorted shares before T+3 without the requirement to deliver any identified or borrowed shares that were ostensibly originally sold. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to understand what can be done with this inequity.

30 years ago, or so, "free-riding" was outlawed by the SEC. Wikipedia has a decent explanation of what free-riding is. But I'll give it a go here: A student, I believe at MIT or Harvard, had made several hundred thousand by putting in buy orders and then selling those shares before settlement (it was T+5 then). His account grew, I guess because he was pretty good at spotting short term trends. He never put up any money, just played with the house money! The SEC put a stop to this. However, what the shorts and manipulators are doing is just that: free-riding. It's the other side of the coin. They are making a transaction without ever having to produce, at settlement, what they purportedly sold.