Short (finance)

Overview

In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of the more common long position, where the investor will profit if the market value of the asset rises. An investor that sells an asset short is, as to that asset, a short seller. There are a number of ways of achieving a short position. The most fundamental is physical selling short or short-selling, by which the short seller borrows an asset (typically a fungible security such as a share or a bond) and sells it. The short seller must later buy the same amount of the asset to return it to the lender. If the market price of the asset has fallen in the meantime, the short seller will have made a profit equal to the difference in price. Conversely, if the price has risen then the short seller will bear a loss. The short seller usually must pay a borrowing fee to borrow the asset (charged at a particular rate over time, similar to an interest payment) and reimburse the lender for any cash return (such as a dividend or interest) that would have been paid on the asset while borrowed. A short position can also be created through a futures, forward, or option contract, by which the short seller assumes an obligation or right to sell an asset at a future date at a price stated in the contract. If the price of the asset falls below the contract price, the short seller can buy it at the lower market value and then sell it at the higher price specified in the contract, and thereby benefit from the lower price. A short position can also be achieved through certain types of swap, such as a contract for difference, which is an agreement between two parties to pay each other the difference if the price of an asset rises or falls, under which the party that will benefit if the price falls will have a short position. Because a short seller can incur a liability to the lender if the price rises, and because a short sale is normally done through a broker, a short seller is typically required to post margin to its broker as collateral to ensure that any such liabilities can be met, and to post additional margin if losses begin to accrue. For analogous reasons, short positions in derivatives also usually involve the posting of margin with the counterparty. A failure to post margin when required may prompt the broker or counterparty to close the position at the then-current price. Short selling is a common practice in public securities, futures, and currency markets where the assets are fungible and reasonably liquid. It is otherwise uncommon, because a short seller needs to be confident that it will be able to repurchase the right quantity of the asset at or around the market price when it decides to close the position. A short sale may have a variety of objectives. Speculators may sell short hoping to realize a profit on an instrument that appears overvalued, just as long investors or speculators hope to profit from a rise in the price of an instrument that appears undervalued. Alternatively, traders or fund managers may use offsetting short positions to hedge certain risks that exist in a long position or a portfolio. Advocates of short selling argue that the practice is an essential part of the price discovery mechanism, but short selling is subject to criticism and periodically faces hostility from society and policymakers because it is perceived to put downward pressure on prices. Nevertheless, research indicates that banning short selling is ineffective and has negative effects on markets.

Physical shorting with borrowed securities

To profit from a decrease in the price of a security, a short seller can borrow the security and sell it, expecting that it will be cheaper to repurchase in the future. When the seller decides that the time is right (or when the lender recalls the securities), the seller buys the same number of equivalent securities and returns them to the lender. The act of buying back the securities that were sold short is called covering the short, covering the position or simply covering. A short position can be covered at any time before the securities are due to be returned. Once the position is covered, the short seller is not affected by subsequent rises or falls in the price of the securities, for it already holds the securities that it will return to the lender. The process relies on the fact that the securities (or the other assets being sold short) are fungible. An investor therefore "borrows" securities in the same sense as one borrows a $10 bill, where the legal ownership of the money is transferred to the borrower and it can be freely disposed of, and different bank notes or coins can be returned to the lender. This can be contrasted with the sense in which one borrows a bicycle, where the ownership of the bicycle does not change and the same bicycle must be returned, not merely one that is the same model. Because the price of a share is theoretically unlimited, the potential losses of a short-seller are also theoretically unlimited.

Worked example of a profitable short sale

Shares in ACME Inc. currently trade at $10 per share.

A short seller borrows from a lender 100 shares of ACME Inc., and immediately sells them for a total of $1,000. Subsequently, the price of the shares falls to $8 per share. Short seller now buys 100 shares of ACME Inc. for $800. Short seller returns the shares to the lender, who must accept the return of the same number of shares as was lent despite the fact that the market value of the shares has decreased. Short seller keeps as its profit the $200 difference between the price at which the short seller sold the borrowed shares and the lower price at which the short seller purchased the equivalent shares (minus borrowing fees paid to the lender).

Worked example of a loss-making short sale

Shares in ACME Inc. currently trade at $10 per share.

A short seller borrows 100 shares of ACME Inc., and sells them for a total of $1,000. Subsequently, the price of the shares rises to $25 per share. Short seller is required to return the shares, and is compelled to buy 100 shares of ACME Inc. for $2,500. Short seller returns the shares to the lender, who accepts the return of the same number of shares as was lent. Short seller incurs as a loss the $1,500 difference between the price at which they sold the borrowed shares and the higher price at which the short seller had to purchase the equivalent shares (plus any borrowing fees).

Synthetic shorting with derivatives

"Shorting" or "going short" (and sometimes also "short selling") also refer more broadly to any transaction used by an investor to profit from the decline in price of a borrowed asset or financial instrument. Derivatives contracts that can be used in this way include futures, options, and swaps. These contracts are typically cash-settled, meaning that no buying or selling of the asset in question is actually involved in the contract, although typically one side of the contract will be a broker that will effect a back-to-back sale of the asset in question in order to hedge their position.

History

The practice of short selling was likely invented in 1609 by Dutch businessman Isaac Le Maire, a sizeable shareholder of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch). The London banking house of Neal, James, Fordyce and Down collapsed in June 1772, precipitating a major crisis that included the collapse of almost every private bank in Scotland, and a liquidity crisis in the two major banking centres of the world, London and Amsterdam. The bank had been speculating by shorting East India Company stock on a massive scale, apparently using customer deposits to cover losses. The term short in the financial sense has been in use from at least the mid-nineteenth century. The word is used, in the sense of "lacking", because the short seller is in a deficit position with their brokerage house regarding the securities that they have borrowed. Jacob Little, known as The Great Bear of Wall Street, began shorting stocks in the United States in 1822. Short sellers were one of the groups blamed for the Wall Street crash of 1929. Regulations governing short selling were implemented in the United States in 1929 and in 1940. Political fallout from the 1929 crash led Congress to enact a law banning short sellers from selling shares during a downtick; this was known as the uptick rule and was in effect until 3 July 2007, when it was removed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC Release No. 34-55970). President Herbert Hoover condemned short sellers and even J. Edgar Hoover said he would investigate short sellers for their role in prolonging the Depression. In 1949, Alfred Winslow Jones founded an unregulated fund that bought stocks whilst selling other stocks short, hence hedging some of the market risk; it is generally considered to be the first hedge fund, a term which dates to 1966. George Soros was blamed for "breaking the Bank of England" on Black Wednesday in 1992, when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds sterling. During the 2008 financial crisis, critics argued that investors taking large short positions in struggling financial firms like Lehman Brothers, HBOS and Morgan Stanley created instability in the stock market and placed additional downward pressure on prices. In response, a number of countries introduced restrictive regulations on short-selling in 2008 and 2009. Naked short selling is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset without first borrowing the security or ensuring that the security can be borrowed, intending to do so after agreeing the sale in order to be able to settle with the settlement period (typically one or two days) –it was this practice that was commonly restricted. Investors argued that it was the weakness of financial institutions, not short-selling, that drove stocks to fall. In September 2008, the Securities Exchange Commission in the United States abruptly banned short sales, primarily in financial stocks, to protect companies under siege in the stock market. That ban expired several weeks later as regulators determined the ban was not stabilizing the price of stocks. Temporary short-selling bans were also introduced in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and other European countries in 2008 to minimal effect. Australia moved to ban naked short selling entirely in September 2008. Germany placed a ban on naked short selling of certain Eurozone securities in 2010. Spain, Portugal and Italy introduced short selling bans in 2011 and again in 2012. During the COVID-19 pandemic, shorting was severely restricted or temporarily banned, with European market watchdogs tightening the rules on short selling "in an effort to stem the historic losses arising from the coronavirus pandemic". In addition to attempted bans, regulators in many jurisdictions (including the European Union and the United Kingdom) require the disclosure of short positions, in order to improve the information in the market regarding the extent of the short interest in particular companies. Worldwide, economic regulators seem inclined to restrict short selling to decrease potential downward price cascades. Investors continue to argue this only contributes to market inefficiency.

Mechanism

A short seller typically borrows through a broker, who is usually holding the securities for another investor who owns the securities; the broker himself seldom purchases the securities to lend to the short seller. The lender does not lose the right to sell the securities while they have been lent, as the broker usually holds a large pool of such securities for a number of investors which, as such securities are fungible, can instead be transferred to any buyer. In most market conditions there is a ready supply of securities to be borrowed, held by pension funds, mutual funds and other investors.

Shorting stock in the U.S.

To sell stocks short in the U.S., the seller must arrange for a broker-dealer to confirm that it can deliver the shorted securities. This is referred to as a locate. Brokers have a variety of means to borrow stocks to facilitate locates and make good on delivery of the shorted security. The vast majority of stocks borrowed by U.S. brokers come from loans made by the leading custody banks and fund management companies (see list below). Institutions often lend out their shares to earn extra money on their investments. These institutional loans are usually arranged by the custodian who holds the securities for the institution. In an institutional stock loan, the borrower puts up cash collateral, typically 102% of the value of the stock. The cash collateral is then invested by the lender, who often rebates part of the interest to the borrower. The interest that is kept by the lender is the compensation to the lender for the stock loan. Brokerage firms can also borrow stocks from the accounts of their own customers. Typical margin account agreements give brokerage firms the right to borrow customer shares without notifying the customer. In general, brokerage accounts are only allowed to lend shares from accounts for which customers have debit balances, meaning they have borrowed from the account. SEC Rule 15c3-3 imposes such severe restrictions on the lending of shares from cash accounts or excess margin (fully paid for) shares from margin accounts that most brokerage firms do not bother except in rare circumstances. (These restrictions include that the broker must have the express permission of the customer and provide collateral or a letter of credit.) Most brokers allow retail customers to borrow shares to short a stock only if one of their own customers has purchased the stock on margin. Brokers go through the "locate" process outside their own firm to obtain borrowed shares from other brokers only for their large institutional customers. Stock exchanges such as the NYSE or the NASDAQ typically report the "short interest" of a stock, which gives the number of shares that have been legally sold short as a percent of the total float. Alternatively, these can also be expressed as the short interest ratio, which is the number of shares legally sold short as a multiple of the average daily volume. These can be useful tools to spot trends in stock price movements but for them to be reliable, investors must also ascertain the number of shares brought into existence by naked shorters. Speculators are cautioned to remember that for every share that has been shorted (owned by a new owner), a 'shadow owner' exists (i.e., the original owner) who also is part of the universe of owners of that stock, i.e., despite having no voting rights, they have not relinquished their interest and some rights in that stock.

Securities lending

When a security is sold, the seller is contractually obliged to deliver it to the buyer. If a seller sells a security short without owning it first, the seller must borrow the security from a third party to fulfill its obligation. Otherwise, the seller fails to deliver, the transaction does not settle, and the seller may be subject to a claim from its counterparty. Certain large holders of securities, such as a custodian or investment management firm, often lend out these securities to gain extra income, a process known as securities lending. The lender receives a fee for this service. Similarly, retail investors can sometimes make an extra fee when their broker wants to borrow their securities. This is only possible when the investor has full title of the security, so it cannot be used as collateral for margin buying.

Sources of short interest data

Time delayed short interest data (for legally shorted shares) is available in a number of countries, including the US, the UK, Hong Kong, and Spain. The number of stocks being shorted on a global basis has increased in recent years for various structural reasons (e.g., the growth of 130/30 type strategies, short or bear ETFs). The data is typically delayed; for example, the NASDAQ requires its broker-dealer member firms to report data on the 15th of each month, and then publishes a compilation eight days later. Some market data providers (like Data Explorers and SunGard Financial Systems) believe that stock lending data provides a good proxy for short interest levels (excluding any naked short interest). SunGard provides daily data on short interest by tracking the proxy variables based on borrowing and lending data it collects.

Short selling terms

Days to Cover (DTC) is the relationship between the number of shares in a given equity that has been legally short-sold and the number of days of typical trading that it would require to 'cover' all legal short positions outstanding. For example, if there are ten million shares of XYZ Inc. that are currently legally short-sold and the average daily volume of XYZ shares traded each day is one million, it would require ten days of average trading for all legal short positions to be covered (10 million / 1 million). Short Interest relates the number of shares in a given equity that have been legally shorted divided by the total shares outstanding for the company, usually expressed as a percent. For example, if there are ten million shares of XYZ Inc. that are currently legally short-sold, and the total number of shares issued by the company is one hundred million, the Short Interest is 10% (10 million / 100 million). If, however, shares are being created through naked short selling, "fails" data must be accessed to assess accurately the true level of short interest. Borrow cost is the fee paid to a securities lender for borrowing the stock or other security. The cost of borrowing the stock is usually negligible compared to fees paid and interest accrued on the margin account – in 2002, 91% of stocks could be shorted for less than a 1% fee per annum, generally lower than interest rates earned on the margin account. However, certain stocks become "hard to borrow" as stockholders willing to lend their stock become more difficult to locate. The cost of borrowing these stocks can become significant – in February 2001, the cost to borrow (short) Krispy Kreme stock reached an annualized 55%, indicating that a short seller would need to pay the lender more than half the price of the stock over the course of the year, essentially as interest for borrowing a stock in limited supply. This has important implications for derivatives pricing and strategy, for the borrow cost itself can become a significant convenience yield for holding the stock (similar to additional dividend) – for instance, put–call parity relationships are broken and the early exercise feature of American call options on non-dividend paying stocks can become rational to exercise early, which otherwise would not be economical.

Major lenders

State Street Corporation (Boston, United States) Merrill Lynch (New Jersey, United States) JP Morgan Chase (New York, United States) Northern Trust (Chicago, United States) Fortis (Amsterdam, Netherlands, now defunct) ABN AMRO (Amsterdam, Netherlands, formerly Fortis) Citibank (New York, United States) Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (New York, United States) UBS AG (Zurich, Switzerland) Barclays (London, United Kingdom)