Everyone wants to ride the rising tide in the stock market by buying stocks and later on selling them at a higher price to make a capital gain. However, can you make money when the tide in the stock market is going down? Yes, you can with short selling. In short selling, yo borrow a stock from your broker and sell it. Later on you buy it back at a much lower price and return it your broker making a good capital gain.
Now for short selling to work, the stock price should go down otherwize, you will make a hefty loss in case the stock price starts to go up. Since, you are trading with a borrowed stock, you have to return that stock to your broker. In case the stock price goes up, you will have to buy it back at a much higher price with a loss. Now, when you go short and the market suddenly turns against you in the sense that it goes in the wrong direction, you are in trouble. You want to buy back the stock but the price is continously going up. The harder it becomes to buy back the required number of shares, the more desperate you will become and the higher the prices can go before you are able to buy back the required number of shares and return them to your broker. So in a way, short selling is tricky and must only be practiced by the experienced traders.
Now, in other markets like the currencies, futures or the options market, you don’t have to borrow the security in order to go short. You can straight away go short by selling that security or currency in the market. Now, short selling in stocks is done by investors with the expectation of a making a capital gain when they expect that stock price to go down in the near future. Short selling is also done by the fund managers to hedge their stock portfolios.
There is something very important that you need to keep an eye on when you go short selling. It is known as Short Interest Ratios. This will help you monitor the rate of short selling in the market. If the rate is too high, it means that too many investors are taking short positions and you need to avoid it. New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ, both report the short interest in stocks listed on them,however, this is done on a monthly basis as brokers need sometime to collect the data of shares that they have lended to their clients for shorting.
Short Interest Ratio is very important for short sellers. Short Interest Ratio can give you important clues about other short sellers in the market. Too much short selling can only drive the stock price down.
So what is the Short Interest Ratio? Short Interest Ratio is the number of shares of a particular stock that has been shorted in the market. Plus the average daily volume for that stock in the same month and also the number of days of trading at the average volume that it would require the market to cover the short positions in that stock. It also reports the percentage change in the short positions from the previous month.
The problem with Short Interest Ratio is that it is not calculated frequently. It is calculated on monthly basis. So, the trader cannot use it to gauge the short positions in the market on a daily or weekly basis. However, it can give you the general trend in the market. A high short interest ratio should make you nervous if you have taken a short position in that stock as most of the investors who are short will soon become desperate to dump that stock in the market and cover their short positions.
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