More about cert requests...
Manti and others, maybe lowman can chime in here if he believes I'm wrong but it may not be 100% necessary for you to keep your certs in your possession for an extended period of time if you do not wish to. The act of you just requesting them could be enough. Granted, I think it would be better if you could keep them out of the market for as long as possible (only takes about 2 days to put them back in the market to trade and that is even if you mail them) but I think the most important thing for people to realize is that, if you are uncomfortable with not having the ability to immediately trade your shares, the simple act of just requesting them and taking them out of the market for only a week can cause great pain to a MM who is short.
With the larger brokerage houses like E*Trade, they likely have a pool of real shares they can pull from so it will take many to request the certs to make a difference. Example... if a large MM has sold 5,000,000 shares to customers but really only had 3,000,000 to sell, he would be short 2,000,000 shares BUT still really has 3,000,000 on the books. So, you get a few guys requesting a handful of certs and he laughs because he just pulls from his bank of 3,000,000 real shares. His pain starts happening when more and more people request certs and his pile of real shares begins to dwindle but his pile of 2,000,000 phantom shares is still there. As soon as more than 3,000,000 are requested, he is SOL and must "get" these shares in the open market. I am in Hemi for the long haul so it is my intent to keep my certs out of the market for quite some time as I do not want to give my shares back to the brokerage only to allow them to take my REAL shares and give them to somebody else... thus making it easier for them to create more phantom shares.
Now, with smaller brokerages who are partaking in this naked shorting practice, they don't have as many customers so IMO the ones who do request their certs really make it rough on these guys. Could be wrong here but I think it is a thought that might be accurate :)
Also, it is important to note that a squeeze can happen in different ways. One, you can get a squeeze due to a cert request and them running out of real shares to deliver the certs. Two, you can get a squeeze due to company fundamentals, huge buying pressure, and the MMs realizing they are not going to be able to cover for a PROFIT and must instead cover at a loss. They HATE doing that and often never have to because they can control the price damn near at will... by creating phantom shares. But, if they created too many phantom shares at prices below our current low for the year (and even last year when they were giving away shares like candy), they may finally realize that all their efforts to make people sell have failed and they will start to cover at as minimal of loss as they can. To go along with this type of squeeze, if you factor in the cert requests, it can make it even more painful for them EVEN IF we weren't able to force them to cover due directly to the cert requests. All us requesting certs is taking their real shares which means they have less to "play" with. So, it'll take a HUGE team effort to force a squeeze on the cert requests alone and to get the necessary amount of people to do it would be rare and unlikely IMO. HOWEVER, just because and if a squeeze is not forced due directly to the cert requests, that doesn't mean your cert request was for nothing... for the reasons I stated above.
Thoughts? I don't proclaim the above to be 100% accurate as it is only the way I see things could happen. If you disagree or have more to add, you won't hurt my feelings as I'm no expert in this area. The main point I wanted to get across to those on the fence about requesting your certs is that, while I think it would be better, you don't need to keep your shares out of the market for an extended period of time. Keeping them out of the market for an extended period of time should cause them the most pain but the small act of requesting them, even if for just a day, may still cause them at least a little bit pain :)
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