A Beginner’s Guide to Short Selling Stocks
A short sell is the promise to deliver a stock the seller does not possess at the time of sale. You must have access to the stock through a broker who will temporarily lend you the stock. The stocks you short come from many sources as they might be owned by your brokerage firm or by another client.
Once the shares are successfully sold, the earnings are credited to your account. Eventually, you would have to “close” the short. This is done by buying back the same number of shares and then returning them to your broker who lent you the stocks you sold. If the price of the stock is lower you make a profit because you could buy the stock back at a lower price. Short sellers lose money when the price of the stock rises because they have to buy it back at a higher price.
You need a broker if you are going to try to play with stocks, especially if you want to short sell. In order to use a broker for your stock dealings, you need to open an account with the firm from where the broker is located. If you open an account with cash, money is directly taken from your account to pay for any purchase. If you open a margin account, you do not need to pay for the purchase directly, and can borrow funds from the firm at the time of the transaction. The account is set up as a way to cover your activity.
In essence, the stock you are short selling does not belong to you as you borrowed it before selling it. You must therefore pay any stock lender the dividends or rights declared during the process of the loan. Therefore, you will owe the lender of the stock twice the number of shares if the stock splits during the course of the loan.
A short selling stock is something that no beginner should try to do as it involves an understanding of the market and an understanding of greater risk. When you short a stock, there is technically no ceiling on the amount of money you can lose. Contrast this with buying a stock where the most you can lose is everything you paid for it but no more. Many also frown on short selling because you are making a bet that a stock will do poorly which is not a productive action.
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