What Is Short Selling Stocks?
You must be thinking that short selling is counter intuitive. It's not! Short selling is a way to profit from a falling market. In nutshell in short s...
You must be thinking that short selling is counter intuitive. It’s not! Short selling is a way to profit from a falling market. In nutshell in short selling stocks, an investor who is short selling is borrowing stocks from the brokers and selling them to another buyer. At some point, the investor has to buy back the stock ideally at a lower price to make profit and return it to the broker. The sale money goes to the account of the investor.
You must be proficient in using technical indicators if you want to become a trader. Without learning technical analysis, you will always be doing trading on your hunches which is a bad thing. Suppose you are using the RSI technical indicator that is giving a crossover sell signal. All signs are pointing towards at least a small pullback. You feel that the stock ABC is overvalued at $60 and at some point in the near future the market will make a correction.
You place an order to short 1000 shares of ABC stock at $60. 1000 shares of stock ABC are sold at $60 and $60,000 is placed in your account. Over the next week, you are jittery as the stock ABC instead of going down climbs to $65.
However, you have catered for this eventuality by placing a stop loss at 10% of your account. This comes out to be $6,000. So the stop loss is not triggered and you are still in the market hoping for the price to stop going up.
You are prepared to lose $6,000 in anticipation of a stock price tumble as your technical indicators are giving you the sell signals. If the price goes up to $66, your stop loss will be triggered and you will be out of the market.
Now most earnings mishaps last a few days. So you wait and don’t cover your short position for the next few days. Suddenly on the release of a disappointing earnings report, the stock price tumbles 20% in one day.
Market hates sudden surprises. Anything that is already known to the market is already included in the price of the stock. So this negative earnings report was a sudden surprise. You decide to cover your short position, stock ABC price falls to $45. You need to buy back the 100 shares of ABC that were sold short earlier at the market price of $45 in order to close your position.
With this simple example, you should be able to understand the mechanics of short selling stocks. You pay $45,000 to buy back 1000 shares of stock ABC and return them to your broker. So your net profit in this case is $60,000-$45,000= $15,000.
In reality, you paid $45 per share to buy ABC stocks and sold them at $60 per share giving you a profit of $15 per share. Assume that you had bought the stocks for $45 per share and sold them at $60 per share, the same profit would have been made.
When you short a stock, the goal is to sell it at a higher price but in the case of short selling stocks, selling takes place first instead of buying. The goal of buying a stock is to sell it at a higher price in the future.
Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try This Cash Printing Service From Heaven! Learn !
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