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jvbigo

05/05/09 3:18 PM

#622451 RE: basserdan #622449

To restore trust in the market..stop misleading hype and deceptive accounting just to increase the stock price for the officers receiving undeserved options.
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brightness

05/05/09 4:51 PM

#622458 RE: basserdan #622449

Lehman and etc. were killed by concentrated short selling for the explicit purpose of "trading for effect." There are already rules against that; enforcement them.

I'm for uptick rules . . . and would suggest an order block size limit on short orders (say, short order size can be no more than 10% of the previous 5 minute's aggregate volume), so that a 0.05 uptick doesn't allow a sudden million-share short order wiping out all outstanding bids. Currently a huge order like that would get priority execution under exchange rules over all other sell orders that might turn the tick down and lock out shorts.

All the energy wasted on attacking "naked shorting" however IMHO is a diversion from the real issue: lack of enforcement against "trading for effect." "Pre-borrowing" is nearly meaningless: obviously the lender account of the shares can not be forbidden from selling the same shares in the following three days between execution and settlement. So the borrowing for execution and borrowing for settlement are by necessity separate events. On settlement day, available shares will be assigned to large outstanding blocks before small blocks, benefitting the wall street institutional traders, and leave the small traders "naked" and subject to forced buy-in! That means the average small traders would then have to buy put options if they want to bet against stocks, driving up option premium, once again benefitting institutional traders.

As we can see, at the lawmaker and their staff/lobbyist level, this attack on "naked shorting" is yet another attempt at using government coercion to benefit insiders at the expense of the rest of the population.

BTW, not all short sells or even naked short sells are betting against the market. One can short SDS (2x bear fund on SP500) instead of longing SSO when the market is expected to go up (and avoid ETF counterparty risks). It would not supprise me at all if most ETF's have far more shares floating around than there are assets in the funds, thanks to naked short selling. They'd be much less liquid if the fund had to buy or sell the underlying every time someone buy or sell the ETF shares.
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brightness

05/05/09 5:24 PM

#622460 RE: basserdan #622449

"In the not-so-distant past, a strategy of long-term buying and holding offered a road map for comfortable living in retirement. "

That line goes to show where the lawmakers come from. If people want a safe mechanism for retirement savings, it should be savings account, not the stock market. It is the government/FED that has capped savings account interest rate so low that people have to gamble in the stock market. While retirees may get some table scraps from a bouyant stock market, it's the executives with stock options and Wall Street firms bringing IPO's that reap the lion's share of the stock market profit.

Remove the FED and its cap on savings interest rate, and people instantly get a way to accummuldate their retirement savings that is far safer than the rigged stock market.
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Dances-W-waves3

05/05/09 5:34 PM

#622461 RE: basserdan #622449

They may one day restore the trust in the market....probably by sending it skyrocketing again, but it will just be a shell game. The market will never be as it once was....a rational investment.