# Naked short selling

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Published: 2026-10-24T16:04:55.976Z

Updated: 2026-10-24T16:04:55.976Z

Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset without first borrowing the asset from another party or ensuring that it can be borrowed. When the seller does not obtain the asset and deliver it to the buyer within the required settlement period, the result is known as a "failure to deliver" (FTD). The transaction generally remains open until the

## Key facts

## Overview

Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset without first borrowing the asset from another party or ensuring that it can be borrowed. When the seller does not obtain the asset and deliver it to the buyer within the required settlement period, the result is known as a "failure to deliver" (FTD). The transaction generally remains open until the asset is acquired and delivered by the seller, or the seller's broker settles the trade on their behalf. Short selling is typically used to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities or to anticipate a price decline, but it exposes the seller to unlimited risk if the price rises instead. Critics have long called for stricter regulations of naked short selling. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted "Regulation SHO" in 2005, requiring broker-dealers to have a reasonable belief that a borrowed security will be available before executing a short sale, and mandating timely delivery of shares. In July 2008, amid escalating financial instability, the SEC issued a temporary order restricting short sales of shares in 19 systemically important financial institutions, strengthening penalties for failures to deliver.  On September 18, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, these restrictions were extended to all U.S. listed companies, including market makers. Later that year, the SEC formally banned what it called "abusive" naked short selling, although naked shorting itself remains not per se illegal under certain technical circumstances, such as bona fide market making activities. In August 2008, the SEC issued a temporary order restricting short-selling in the shares of 19 financial firms deemed systemically important, by reinforcing the penalties for failing to deliver the shares in time.  Effective September 18, amid claims that aggressive short selling had played a role in the failure of financial giant Lehman Brothers, the SEC extended and expanded the rules to remove exceptions and to cover all companies, including market makers. A 2014 peer-reviewed study by researchers at the University at Buffalo, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, concluded that failures to deliver did not cause price distortions or financial firms' failures during the 2008 financial crisis. Instead the authors found the larger FTDs increased liquidity and pricing efficiency, with effects comparable to those of conventional short sales". Despite regulations, some market commentators have argued that naked shorting remains widespread and that enforcement of SEC rules is weak.  Critics contended that the practice can be abused to manipulate stock prices, damage companies' ability to raise capital, and contribute to bankruptcies. Conversely, opponents of stricter regulation argue that concerns of naked shorting are overstated, describing them as a "devil theory", and an inefficient use of regulatory resources.

## "Normal" shorting

Short selling is a form of speculation that allows a trader to take a "negative position" in a stock of a company. Such a trader first borrows shares of that stock from their owner (the lender), typically via a bank or a prime broker under the condition that they will return them on demand. Next, the trader sells the borrowed shares and delivers them to the buyer who becomes their new owner. The buyer is typically unaware that the shares have been sold short: their transaction with the trader proceeds just as if the trader owned rather than borrowed the shares. Some time later, the trader closes their short position by purchasing the same number of shares in the market and returning them to the lender. The trader's profit is the difference between the sale price and the purchase price of the shares. In contrast to "going long" where sale succeeds the purchase, short sale precedes the purchase. Because the seller/borrower is generally required to make a cash deposit equivalent to the sale proceeds, it offers the lender some security.

## Naked shorts in the United States

Naked short selling is a case of short selling without first arranging a borrow. If the stock is in short supply, finding shares to borrow can be difficult. The seller may also decide not to borrow the shares, in some cases because lenders are not available, or because the costs of lending are too high. When shares are not borrowed within the clearing time period and the short-seller does not tender shares to the buyer, the trade is considered to have "failed to deliver". Nevertheless, the trade will continue to sit open or the buyer may be credited the shares by the DTCC until the short-seller either closes out the position or borrows the shares. It is difficult to measure how often naked short selling occurs. Fails to deliver are not necessarily indicative of naked shorting, and can result from both "long" transactions (stock purchases) and short sales. Naked shorting can be invisible in a liquid market, as long as the short sale is eventually delivered to the buyer. However, if the covers are impossible to find, the trades fail. Fail reports are published regularly by the SEC, and a sudden rise in the number of fails-to-deliver will alert the SEC to the possibility of naked short selling. In some recent cases, it was claimed that the daily activity was larger than all of the available shares, which would normally be unlikely.

## Extent of naked shorting

The reasons for naked shorting, and the extent of it, had been disputed for several years before the SEC's 2008 action to prohibit the practice. What is generally recognized is that naked shorting tends to happen when shares are difficult to borrow. Studies have shown that naked short selling also increases with the cost of borrowing. A Los Angeles Times editorial in July 2008 said that naked short selling "enables speculators to drive down a company's stock by offering an overwhelming number of shares for sale". The SEC has stated that naked shorting is sometimes falsely asserted as a reason for a share price decline, when, often, "the price decrease is a result of the company's poor financial situation rather than the reasons provided by the insiders or promoters." Before 2008, regulators had generally downplayed the extent of naked shorting in the US. At a North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) conference on naked short selling in November 2005, an official of the New York Stock Exchange stated that NYSE had not found evidence of widespread naked short selling. In 2006, an official of the SEC said that "While there may be instances of abusive short selling, 99% of all trades in dollar value settle on time without incident." Of all those that do not, 85% are resolved within 10 business days and 90% within 20. That means that about 1% of shares that change hands daily, or about $1 billion per day, are subject to delivery failures, although the SEC has stated that "fails-to-deliver can occur for a number of reasons on both long and short sales", and accordingly that they do not necessarily indicate naked short selling. In 2008, SEC chairman Christopher Cox said that the SEC "has zero tolerance for abusive naked short-selling" while implementing new regulations to prohibit the practice, culminating in the September 2008 action following the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers amidst speculation that naked short selling had played a contributory role. Cox said that "the rule would be designed to ensure transparency in short-selling in general, beyond the practice of naked short-selling."

## Claimed effects of naked shorting

The SEC is committed to maintaining orderly securities markets. The abusive practice of naked short selling is far different from ordinary short selling, which is a healthy and necessary part of a free market. Our agency’s rules are highly supportive of short selling, which can help quickly transmit price signals in response to negative information or prospects for a company. Short selling helps prevent "irrational exuberance" and bubbles. But when someone fails to borrow and deliver the securities needed to make good on a short position, after failing even to determine that they can be borrowed, that is not contributing to an orderly market – it is undermining it. And in the context of a potential "distort and short" campaign aimed at an otherwise sound financial institution, this kind of manipulative activity can have drastic consequences. As with the prevalence of naked shorting, the effects are contested. The SEC has stated that the practice can be beneficial in enhancing liquidity in difficult-to-borrow shares, while others have suggested that it adds efficiency to the securities lending market. Critics of the practice argue that it is often used for market manipulation, that it can damage companies and even that it threatens the broader markets. One complaint about naked shorting from targeted companies is that the practice dilutes a company's shares for as long as unsettled short sales sit open on the books. This has been alleged to create "phantom" or "counterfeit" shares, sometimes going from trade to trade without connection to any physical shares, and artificially depressing the share price. However, the SEC has disclaimed the existence of counterfeit shares and stated that naked short selling would not increase a company's outstanding shares. Short seller David Rocker contended that failure to deliver securities "can be done for manipulative purposes to create the impression that the stock is a tight borrow", although he said that this should be seen as a failure to deliver "longs" rather than "shorts". Robert J. Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, and a consultant to a law firm suing over naked shorting, has claimed that naked short selling has cost investors $100 billion and driven 1,000 companies into the ground. Richard Fuld, the former CEO of the financial firm Lehman Brothers, during hearings on the bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers and bailout of AIG before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform alleged that a host of factors including a crisis of confidence and naked short selling attacks followed by false rumors contributed to the collapse of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Fuld had been obsessed with short sellers and had even demoted those Lehman executives that dealt with them; he claimed that the short sellers and the rumour mongers had brought down Lehman, although he had no evidence of it. Upon the examination of the issue of whether "naked short selling" was in any way a cause of the collapse of Bear Stearns or Lehman, securities experts reached the conclusion that the alleged "naked short sales" occurred after the collapse and therefore played no role in it. House committee Chairman Henry Waxman said the committee received thousands of pages of internal documents from Lehman and these documents portray a company in which there was "no accountability for failure". In July 2008, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox said there was no "unbridled naked short selling in financial issues".

## Regulations by market

Several international exchanges have either partially or fully restricted the practice of naked short selling of shares. They include Australia's Australian Securities Exchange, India's Securities and Exchange Board, the Netherlands's Euronext Amsterdam, Japan's Tokyo Stock Exchange, and Switzerland's SWX Swiss Exchange. Also Spain's securities regulator CNMV. In August 2011, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and South Korea temporally banned all short selling in their financial stocks, while Germany pushed for a eurozone-wide ban on naked short selling.

## Germany

On May 18, 2010, the German Minister of Finance announced that naked short sales of euro-denominated government bonds, credit default swaps based on those bonds, and shares in Germany's ten leading financial institutions will be prohibited. This ban went into effect that night and was set to expire on March 31, 2011. On May 28, German financial market regulator BaFin announced that this ban would be permanent. The ban became effective July 27, 2010. The International Monetary Fund issued a report in August 2010 saying that the measure succeeded only in impeding the markets. It said the ban "did relatively little to support the targeted institutions’ underlying stock prices, while liquidity dropped and volatility rose substantially." The IMF said there was no strong evidence that stock prices fell because of shorting.

## India

In March 2007, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which disallowed short sales altogether in 2001 as a result of the Ketan Parekh affair, reintroduced short selling under regulations similar to those developed in the United States. In conjunction with this rule change, SEBI outlawed all naked short selling.

## Japan

Japan's naked shorting ban started on November 4, 2008, and was originally scheduled to run until July 2009, but was extended through October of that year. Japan's Finance Minister, Shōichi Nakagawa stated, "We decided (to move up the short-selling ban) as we thought it could be dangerous for the Tokyo stock market if we do not take action immediately." Nakagawa added that Japan's Financial Services Agency would be teaming with the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission and Tokyo Stock Exchange to investigate past violations of Japanese regulations on stock short-selling. The ban was subsequently extended through October 2010.

## Singapore

The Singapore Exchange started to penalize naked short sales with an interim measure in September, 2008. These initial penalties started at $100 per day. In November, they announced plans to increase the fines for failing to complete trades. The new penalties would penalize traders who fail to cover their positions, starting at $1,000 per day. There would also be fines for brokerages who fail to use the exchange's buying-in market to cover their positions, starting at $5,000 per day. The Singapore exchange had stated that the failure to deliver shares inherent in naked short sales threatened market orderliness.

## Securities Exchange Act of 1934

The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 stipulates a settlement period up to two business days before a stock needs to be delivered, generally referred to as "T+2 delivery".

## Regulation SHO

The SEC enacted Regulation SHO in January 2005 to target abusive naked short selling by reducing FTD securities, and by limiting the time in which a broker can permit failures to deliver. In addressing the first, it stated that a broker or dealer may not accept a short sale order without having first borrowed or identified the stock being sold. The rule had the following exemptions:

Broker or dealer accepting a short sale order from another registered broker or dealer Bona fide market making Broker-dealer effecting a sale on behalf of a customer that is deemed to own the security pursuant to Rule 200 through no fault of the customer or the broker-dealer. To reduce the duration for which fails to deliver are permitted to sit open, the regulation requires broker-dealers to close out open fail-to-deliver positions in threshold securities that have persisted for 13 consecutive settlement days. The SEC, in describing Regulation SHO, stated that failures to deliver shares that persist for an extended period of time "may result in large delivery obligations where stock settlement occurs". Regulation SHO also created the "Threshold Security List", which reported any stock where more than 0.5% of a company's total outstanding shares failed delivery for five consecutive days. A number of companies have appeared on the list, including Krispy Kreme, Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Delta Air Lines. The Motley Fool, an investment website, observes that "when a stock appears on this list, it is like a red flag waving, stating 'something is wrong here!'" However, the SEC clarified that appearance on the threshold list "does not necessarily mean that there has been abusive naked short selling or any impermissible trading in the stock". In July 2006, the SEC proposed to amend Regulation SHO, to further reduce failures to deliver securities. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox referred to "the serious problem of abusive naked short sales, which can be used as a tool to drive down a company's stock price" and that the SEC is "concerned about the persistent failures to deliver in the market for some securities that may be due to loopholes in Regulation SHO".

## Sources

- Naked short selling · Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3898531

Source: Wikipedia contributors — https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3898531&oldid=1377874116

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Adaptation notice: Reformatted for XPay; the source may be abridged, restructured or translated. Consult the cited revision for the original.