“Naked shorting is the illegal practice of short selling shares that have not been affirmatively determined to exist. Ordinarily, traders must borrow a stock, or determine that it can be borrowed before they sell it short. Due to various loopholes in the rules, and discrepancies between paper and electronic trading systems, naked shorting continues to happen.
These short sales are almost always done only by options market makers because they allegedly need to do so in order to maintain liquidity in the options markets. However, these options market makers are often brokers or large hedge funds who abuse the options market maker exemption.”
Seems to me be hard for the TA or SEC or anyone but the hedge funds or MMs creating the naked shorts or phantom shares to have any account of the true number since they are not even affirmatively determined to exist !
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