Short Interest Ratios And Short Selling Secret

Short Interest Ratios And Short Selling Secret

Everyone knows that when the stock prices goes up this is the best time to invest and make money. But can you make money when the stock prices go down. Well, you can with short selling. Many people have difficulty understanding short selling. So what is short selling. In essence, when you expect the price of a certain stock to go down, you borrow it from your brokers and sell it in the market. Later on you buy it back and return the stock to your broker. Since the stock price was lower when you bought it back as compared to when you sold it, you made a capital gain. This is in nutshell what is short selling.

Short selling works if the price continues to fall. If the price does not fall or retraces after sometime, you can make a hefty loss on your short position. The loans that are taken in order to go short have to be repaid! If the lender asks them or the price goes up, the trader has to buy back shares in order to make the repayment. Now, the harder it becomes to get the right number of shares in the market, the more desperate the trader will become and the higher the prices can go.

In case of futures or options, you don't need to borrow the security; you simply agree to sell the contract when you go short. Why do investors take a short position? The most obvious reason is that they are expecting the price to go down further. Short selling is also used for hedging purposes.

In the case of stocks, you need to monitor the rate of short selling in order to gauge investor expectation as well as the future market direction. Now, NYSE and NASDAQ report the short interest in stocks listed with them. Now this data is released on monthly basis as the brokerage firms may need a while to report how many shares have been shorted and then report that data to the exchange.

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. It also reports the percentage change in the short positions from the previous month. 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.

An increase in the short interest ratio means that the investors are becoming nervous about the stock. Now, this number is not calculated frequently. What this means is that the trader cannot get a lot of information out of it. But still a high short interest ratio means that the stock prices will go high soon as the investors with short positions become desperate to buy it back. High Short Interest Ratios along with bullish indicators is an indication that prices are going to go up soon rather than down.