Comments on: Interactive Brokers brings the stock loan marketplace to the independent trader

By: Q&A – Saturday morning mailbag: Time & sales, position sizing, « Reaper Trades

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:13:53 +0000

[...] large trades that don’t occur? 2. How do I enable AQS Stock Loan / Borrow in IB? (I suggested seeing my post on that and then signing up to my email list so you can see another post on it; there is a link on [...]

By: BearNine

BearNine — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:18:26 +0000

Neat.

By: Reaper

Reaper — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:36:00 +0000

Jamal, there are plenty of hard to borrow stocks that are fairly large and liquid. Back in 2000 there were plenty of large-cap stocks that were hard to borrow. The money IB makes on even a couple small hedge funds playing CIT and similar stocks is much greater than what they make from thousands of penny stock traders with $10,000 in equity.

By: Jamal Chahboune

Jamal Chahboune — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:48:06 +0000

Perhaps there are a few big fish that engage in short selling hard to borrow stocks but it is definetly more appropriate for accounts below the required minimum IB want. After all, it was this lack of scalability that led to Tim’s fund investing in Cygnus, and eventually him teaching his strategy. This feature would have been infinetly better if it was open to small fish.

By: Reaper

Reaper — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:28:46 +0000

I added the link to AQS’ website above:
http://www.tradeaqs.com

By: How to borrow shares to short « Reaper Trades

How to borrow shares to short « Reaper Trades — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

[...] [Update 10/31/2009 - IB now allows for borrowing / lending stock through the AQS stock loan marketplace. See my post on that new feature.] [...]

By: Reaper

Reaper — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:17:40 +0000

Oh and Jamal … plenty of hedge funds short hard to borrow stocks, like OSTK and CIT.

As to OTC BB stocks, they’ll never be easy to short no matter what, because they usually have a tiny float or all the shares are controlled by insiders.

By: Reaper

Reaper — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:15:52 +0000

I disagree with Yngvai & Jamal — this could be incredibly useful, at least for me. I can think of more than a few stocks Nasdaq I couldn’t find at IB/TOS/Sogo over the last few months. Furthermore, I prefer to trade through IB because I like its platform and I have most of my money here. So the ability to get more stocks here (and not at TOS or Sogo) will be useful to me. Furthermore, the ability to pre-borrow will be great for those times when I may want to wait to short but IB has only a small number of shares to short; that way I avoid the risk of them running out of shares.

By: Jamal Chahboune

Jamal Chahboune — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:27:37 +0000

Holy shit all the pennystocking legends in one place at one time: timmy sykes, reaper, james, btb, timmy bohen.

nah this feature is useless. hard to borrow stocks are typically the less liquid ones. they are therefore rarely traded by guys with six figure accounts since they won’t be able to build up meaningful positions without significant market impact. the only people that would have benefited from this feature would be the people that actually engage in short selling penny stocks (aka hard to borrow stocks) and that is the people who play pennystocks in general: accounts BELOW six figures. yet this feature is only available to accounts ABOVE six figures. stupid.

By: Yngvai

Yngvai — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:58:06 +0000

Yeah usually when I have problems with borrows it’s with OTCBB and pink sheet stocks. I rarely have problem with NASDAQ stocks; if IB doesn’t have borrows, Genesis usually does.