“The SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] adopts rules against naked short-selling,” writes Marcy Gordon of The Associated Press. I laughed my assets off when I read this headline just a few hours ago. This is why I love forex (or foreign exchange) for day trading so much better than stocks.
I’m not saying that naked short-selling should be allowed, but things like this always happen in the stock market during times of crisis (like today when the Dow dropped over 4%). There are so many stupid regulations in the US stock market to control the price of stocks that one might wonder how “free” of a market the stock market really is.
You never hear forex day traders blurb out terms such as “curbs in” or “halted for news pending,” when referring to the buying and selling of Euros, Dollars, and Yens. It’s really quite silly how regulators attempt to control periods of high volatility in the stock market. Many traditional investors and traders (by that, I mean folks who believe that stocks are the best thing since sliced bread) actually swallow the moronic excuse that such artificial price controls are there to protect investors when the world is “freaking out.” Nonsense.
A free market should be allowed to fluctuate by the laws of supply and demand. If traders want to take the stock of a greedy insurance company who got caught with its hand in the real-estate-bubble cookie jar to zero, so be it (anyone got life insurance with AIG? :). Why does the government have to use my tax dollars to bail them out?!?!
Let the system implode from its own avarice I say. We’ve been screaming bubble when it comes to stocks and real estate for over three years now during our managed account webinars. The best way to get rid of a bubble is to let it blow up; not to patch it up with rules against short selling. If you’re trading stocks, how else would you make money when the market is getting hammered other than by selling short?
Apparently, our government doesn’t even want us to sell short stocks anymore. In the same AP article, Gordon states, “Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, New York Democratics, asked the SEC to temporarily ban all short-selling, not just naked short-selling, of stocks of major financial companies.” That one made me pee in my pants (can I say that here?).
If you are a day trader or want to take up day trading, please do yourself a favor and get out of the stock market. Trading currencies, in my humble opinion, is much better. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t read throughout this site yet.
