Short-Selling, Puts & Inverse ETFs 02 (Feb 12 - Dec 25)

[winston]

TOL:-

Shorts got whacked today in Asia ?

[winston]

TOL:-

After the US Presidential Election, would the mother of all short-selling opportunites be surfacing ?

Will this opportunity be the one, to bring you to the Next Level ?

Is this where your decades of hard-knocking, is being turned into some serious money ?

[winston]

The question is, "Whether the shorts have covered ?". And low short-selling volume could be good for being long in the short-term .

Short Squeezeability Of Two Main Market ETFs Slides To Multi Year Lows by Tyler Durden

Exactly one year ago, the short-interest in SPY (the S&P 500 ETF) reached epic heights at over 536mm shares. At the same time, short-interest in QQQ (the Nasdaq ETF) also short-term peaked at over 116mm shares short.

While QQQ has seen a gentle drift lower in general (somewhat reflective of trading volumes in the last few years), since July of last year SPY has seen a 62% drop in short-interest and QQQ 59%.

QQQ short-interest is now its lowest since October 2000 and SPY short-interest its equal lowest since October 2007 and so ammunition for charging this market higher seems to be running out.

This is even more highlighted by the 45% and 30% plunge in QQQ and SPY short-interest in the last six weeks alone.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/short-squ ... -year-lows

[winston]

The Key Criteria For Selecting The Best Short Sale Candidates by Brian Lund

The following are some of the criteria that factor into my selection process for a short candidate.

Please note that I am not talking about shorting ETFs, only stocks.

The following are some of the criteria that factor into my selection process for a short candidate. Please note that I am not talking about shorting ETFs, only stocks.

[winston]

Stock Operator’s Page–Massive Put Activity
August 5, 2012


There was a massive jump in put options late last week on Wall Street. Some stocks increased their daily volume by 800% and others saw their daily put volume up 500%.

It is claimed that the last time this happened was in the four days before 911. At that time airlines and insurance companies were heavily shorted. In theory 911 was a random event but stock exchange activity in puts that make money when a stock goes down was extraordinarily high.

Some people knew.

I suppose an attack could come at the Olympics but I feel a false flag attack in London is too obvious. Maybe I’m naive, but there is so much already written about a possible false flag attack blaming Iran that if it happened no one will believe it.

Then again perhaps it doesn’t matter to the authorities if no one believes it. Not many believe the official 911 story either, but it doesn’t make any difference, and the perpetrators have never been brought to justice. It’s all so interesting. Pray for peace even if it doesn’t work

http://www.stuartwilde.com/2012/08/10888/

[winston]

TOL:-

It may not be time to buy a Put yet but it's certainly time to clean up the watchlist of candidates to short.

I dont think things would be that great after the November Election.

In addition, they probably would have run out of bullets by then, to really do anything meaningful.

[winston]

AAR

Bought a Bear Put on the Hang Seng this morning, at 40x leverage, betting that the HSBC PMI will come in very weak.

Immediately, I keyed in a Stop Loss of 7%.

Within a few minutes, I was stopped out when the PMI were within expectations.

And without that Stop, I would now be down 15%, instead of 7%.

Need to continuosly remind myself to key in a Trailing Stop Loss, if I want to play with WMD.

[winston]

TOL:-

Am reminding myself not to be a hero before the US Presidential election.

If you still wanna become a hero, you could end up a zero.

[winston]

Shanghai short-seller Huang zooms in on deceit

Shortly before the Shanghai stock market closed on August 13, Huang Sheng, China's first celebrity short-seller, declared victory over CITIC Securities Co after its shares swooned 9 percent in a rough day's trade.

“I've shorted CITIC,'' Huang said in a blog posted about 40 minutes before the closing bell, adding he expected the stock to fall further.
He was right. Shares in CITIC Securities, the country's biggest listed brokerage, have continued to decline since, and Huang earned a tidy profit on his short position thanks to reforms that allowed short-selling of mainland shares for the first time less than two years ago, Samuel Shen and Pete Sweeney of Reuters report.

Those that followed his example made money too. On the day Huang published his post, 2.249 million CITIC shares were short-sold, almost the maximum amount available for the purpose.

The prognostications of Huang, 33, who says he has an economics degree from prestigious Peking University and many years of experience in banking and private equity, have attracted plenty of attention. His microblog boasts 233,823 followers – almost as many as China's largest mutual fund's micro-blog – and he is often quoted in the domestic press.

His strategy was pioneered by Western short-sellers in China. Companies like Muddy Waters – a name referring to a Chinese proverb about taking advantage of murky situations – published allegations about accounting irregularities at US-listed Chinese firms that caused multiple forcible delistings, a swathe of shareholder lawsuits and investigations by overseas regulators.

By borrowing stock in such companies at a higher price and repaying it at a much cheaper one, the Western shorters made millions of dollars, if few friends.

Huang is trying to implement a milder version of that strategy in China, but he faces far more formidable obstacles than the foreigners did.
“I don't think that the regulatory system in China is ready for Muddy Waters kind of short-sellers,'' said Paul Gillis, professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.

“I think there's going to be a knee-jerk reaction by regulators to defend the company.’’

While short-selling remains legal, regulators have recently begun targeting “rumor-mongering'' about listed companies.

Regulators said such rumors played a role in the dive in CITIC Securities shares on August 13. Huang was not the only blogger saying CITIC was overvalued on that day: another claimed that CITIC had lost 2.9 billion yuan overseas; another, that the company's boss was targeted by a criminal investigation; yet another, that massive layoffs were imminent.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission said on Tuesday it would punish three individuals for concocting the rumors, but made no mention of Huang or short-selling. Huang told Reuters he has not been targeted by the CSRC.

Like the foreign short-sellers, Huang argues that he is providing the market with a cleaning service.

“The water in China's stock market is muddy indeed,'' he said. “There are too many cases of fraud and deceit in Chinese listed companies. Short-sellers can help supervise and punish them.''

China launched short-selling in late 2011, allowing investors to sell borrowed stocks. But the business is restricted to fewer than 300 of the country's nearly 2,500 listed companies and the number of shares available for lending is limited.

Huang said his comments on listed firms were based on publicly available information, to which he applies his professional analysis.
For example, his attack on CITIC Securities was based on an argument that it had overpaid for Credit Agricole's Asia brokerage unit CLSA in March

Source: The Standard HK

[winston]

TOL:-

If you are not successful in squeezing the shorts today, it's very likely that you will not be able to squeeze them on another day.

Can you not see the white in their eyes, from the fear of last night ?