Typography

Jim Chanos, famous short seller. We are all Jim Chanos. Most people find the idea of short-selling to be incomprehensible. Buy a stock and hold it, that's what one does. To the majority of us it's just down-right odd to do the reverse, borrow stock in order to sell. At the same time, pretty much everyone in the world is a short seller, even if we don't realize it. The credit card debt we wrack up, the lines of credit, the pay day loans, the mortgages—they're all examples of us going short. We borrow a certain type of security—dollars or yen or other types of money, either in paper or digital format—and immediately sell it. And then after a little time passes we cover that short, buying the dollars or yen back and repaying the loan. We are all Jim Chanos, the world's most famous short seller, the only difference being we tend to short different instruments than Chanos does. The only time I ever sold a stock short was back in 1999. I was still in university and probab...

John Bogle, father of passive investing With fees as low as 0.10%, passively managed ETFs are one of the cheapest ways to get exposure to equities. Not bad, but here's a financial product that would be even cheaper for investors: an equity deposit . I figure that equity deposits would be so cost efficient that rather than charging a management fee, investors would be paid to own them . To understand how equity deposits would work, I want to make an analogy to bank deposits. Think of an equity ETF as a chequing account and an equity deposit, or ED, as a term deposit. In the same way that chequing deposits can be offloaded on demand, an ETF can be sold whenever the owner wants, say on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. Equity deposits, like term deposits, would be locked in until their term was up up. Issued in 1-month, 3-month, 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year terms, EDs would replicate a popular equity index like the S&P 500. Given that both ETFs and EDs track the same index, and...

Jacob Little , legendary short seller. The Great Bear of Wall Street 1794 - 186 This is a guest post by Mike Sproul To understand short-selling, start with three words: “Borrow and sell.” The short-seller in figure 1 borrows a share of GM stock from a stockholder and then sells that share of stock to a buyer for $60 cash. If GM subsequently drops to $50, then the short-seller can buy a share of GM on the open market for $50, repay that share to the stock-lender, and profit $10. But if GM instead rises to $70, then the short-seller loses $10, since he must pay $70 to buy the stock before repaying it to the stock-lender.                                                       As the short-seller borrows one share of GM, he hands his IOU to the stock-lender. This IOU promises to deliver a share of GM stock. (It would also promise to compensate the stock lender for any dividends missed as a result of lending the stock.) Since the IOU can be redeemed for a genuine share, the IOU will be worth...

Photo by Spencer Tunick , Netherlands 8 (Dream Amsterdam Foundation) 2007 [ link ] If short sellers are considered to be the Mussolinis of the financial market, then naked short sellers are its Hitlers. In this post I'll show that naked short selling isn't solely a hedge fund or equity market phenomenon. In fact, the good old fashioned practice of deposit banking amounts to what is essentially naked short selling, thus making staid bankers, and not hedge funds, the world's largest naked short sellers. This means that anyone who vilifies the naked short selling of equities must also be against the common practice of banking—a crack pot position if there ever was one. Short selling is when an investor borrows shares of, say, Microsoft, then sells those shares in the open market. At some point—either at the lender's behest or the investor's—the borrower will repurchase the shares in the open market and return them to the lender. A short seller hopes that the price of ...

Berkshire Hathaway annual general meeting When you purchase a share you're not only getting the opportunity to make some extra cash. You're also buying a vote. Put differently, a share offers two different features: a) a claim on earnings and b) the right to exercise partial control over the corporation.* Why not separate the two features and put each of them up for sale? Let's have one market for corporate votes, and a separate one for corporate returns. Here's how it would work. Imagine you want to buy some Microsoft shares but don't care to participate in the governance of Microsoft. The quoted price on the market, $44.93, is for a whole share of Microsoft, both its attached voting rights and its capitalized return. So you buy 500 whole shares for $27,465. Next you turn to the parallel public voting market. Microsoft votes are trading for around 25 cents each, say. You 'detach' each of the 500 votes from the shares you've just bought and sell those vo...

This is a guest post by Mike Sproul. Many of you may know Mike from his comments on this blog and other economics blogs. I first encountered Mike at the Mises.com website back in 2007 where he would eagerly debate ten or twenty angry Austrians at the same time. Mike was the first to make me wonder why central banks had assets at all. Here is Mike's website.   On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced that it had raised its ownership stake in Volkswagen to 43%, at the same time that it had acquired options that could increase its stake by a further 31%, to a total ownership stake of 74%. The state of Lower Saxony already owned another 20% stake in VW, so Porsche's announcement meant that only 6% of VW's shares were in “free float”, that is, held by investors who might be interested in selling. Porsche's buying had inflated the price of VW stock, and investors had been selling VW short, expecting that once Porsche's buying spree ended, VW shares would fall back to reali...

In my other life, I analyze the stock market. I always find it interesting when the stock market reveals its often hidden monetary nature. The common assumption is that monetary analysis should be confined to a narrow range of coins, dollar bills, central bank reserves, and bank deposits. But this ignores the fact that all valuable things in an economy have a degree of liquidity, including stocks. A stock's price can be decomposed into a "fundamental" component and a liquidity component. Fundamental value arises from a stockholder's right to receive any distribution of the assets of a corporation. The liquidity component is the premium on top of fundamental value that arises from the owner's ability to easily sell that stock. Knowing that a stock can be easily sold provides the owner with a degree of comfort that would otherwise be lacking if the stock was less saleable, or not saleable at all. This "comforting service" is built into the stock's pric...

People often have difficulties wrapping their head around the idea of selling a stock short. It seems odd. Once people understand how it works, they also tend to perceive short-selling as immoral. They also assume that only a few malcontents engage in that sort of transaction. But everyone either has been, is, or will be a short-seller. When you short a stock, you're basically borrowing a stock and immediately selling it in the market. When the lender of the stock demands the stock back, as the short seller you've got to buy the stock back in the open market and deliver it to the lender. Now consider someone who borrows from the bank. You borrow a deposit and immediately sell it in the market. When the bank demands the deposit back, as the borrower you have to buy the deposit back in the open market and deliver it to the bank. These two transactions are the same transaction. Borrow an asset, sell it, and when the lender requires delivery, buy it back and deliver it to the lende...