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Why shorting shares is both vital and good for investors and for society

Tom Winnifrith
Sunday 13 July 2014

Shorters, or bear raiders, are vilified by the ignorant as destroyers of wealth and of jobs. Some folks want shorting banned. They are wrong. The only people who benefit from banning shorting are crooks, liars and frauds. Capitalism needs shorters for it to work efficiently. Here’s why.

Let me ask you to point out how many PLCs the FCA or before it the FSA ever called out for fraud and had suspended? Er…zippo. The Regulator is a box ticker, an agency of Government and thus, by definition, useless. It would argue that its job is not to seek out fraud but to act on it when shown evidence. That might just be a defence but you then ask who will seek out fraud and thus present the authorities with that evidence?

Occasionally you have a kind hearted soul such as myself who does just that. But the reality is that spending months and months researching a company really is not going to make you rich. The ShareProphets operation generates enough revenue to allow me to spend some time doing such work but I could not afford to do it full time. 

And thus the only folks who are going to have enough of a financial incentive to do such work are those in the bear raiding community. It took Gotham City many months to prove up its dossier against Spanish fraud Gowex. Now I know that Daniel Yu gets an intellectual kick

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About Tom Winnifrith
Bio
Tom Winnifrith is the editor of TomWinnifrith.com. When he is not harvesting olives in Greece, he is (planning to) raise goats in Wales.
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