Short selling

Home REIT – A Personal Viewpoint

This article reflects the opinions of its author and not necessarily those of ShareSoc. Initial Period  Home REIT (HOME) appeared to offer rather an attractive proposition. It was intended to purchase residential properties and lease them at affordable rents to charities and public bodies (“the tenants”) providing accommodation for the homeless. The rent was supposed to be covered by housing benefits paid directly to the tenants, i.e. fully government backed. Rental income was expected to be sufficient to support a dividend of at ...

It Pays to Take Note of Shorters

An article by ShareSoc member Michael Taylor In light of the recent Burford Capital judgement that my friend Paul de Gruchy has written about in detail here, this has led to much debate about shorting, some of which I hope to add to here in this article. Is shorting bad? Yes and no. It can be. A broker who goes short on a stock then offers to conduct an equity placing for the same company in order to close their position is clearly blatant ...

IQE, The Long and the Short of IQE?

I see that T Rowe Price now owns 17% of IQE, but has lent out 4.75%. The amount it has lent out reduced from 5% to 4.75% on 25 July 2019. see https://www.voxmarkets.co.uk/rns/announcement/6f11c0e6-1401-419b-b9c5-e19356c177fc/ On 24 July, Coltrane Asset Management, L.P. increased its short position from 4.10% to 4.33%. So will someone who is short be squeezed, as you cannot short a stock unless someone agrees to lend the share? I read this as T Rowe is a long term holder of IQE, but happy ...

Short selling petition

The recent shorting attacks on companies such as Quindell, Blinkx and Globo have dismayed many new investors in UK stock markets. Indeed this is what one of our correspondents had to say: "As someone who has recently taken the advice of many, including government, to invest in the stock market, I thought you might be interested to know that I have quickly realised that the whole thing is a manipulated scam and that I will be having nothing to do with ...