Individual traders seem to prefer playing king of the mountain instead. I am going to take a chance and see if anyone wants to collaborate in some small ways. Coming up with good short sale candidates is time consuming. I am always glad to disclose my short positions to anyone who wants to know.
DQ is my latest short position. I am interested in any bearish positions others have or are have already taken.
I do have a word of caution. Retail brokers are sharing customer’s positions with high frequency trading firms. Very few retail customers short stocks. The hfts focus goosing efforts on stocks that retail customers have shorted. This is not sabotage of individual accounts. There is no reason to think names are given out. If customer A is short stock B, that means statistically, lots of weak hands are short stock B. No one need take my word. Short 5 shares of ten different stocks and notice the disproportionate number that get hft-eed.
As a remedy, I have more positions in bearish etfs than I normally would. VXX and SKK are two which I believe will gain value rapidly in a crash scenario. VXX is a very poor long term issue because it has a negative bias and the path of least resistance is down. SKK is not a whole lot better in that regard. A crash is a bad deal because there is no chance to take new positions as equity builds.
Still, the crash ingredients are in place minus the market being oversold. This is the first time in history when we have had a created bull market for the purpose of creating a wealth effect in the economy. That adds an additional leval of fragility.
Edited by James Quillian, 13 February 2014 - 11:35 PM.
