Naked Short Selling - Studies

Studies

A study of trading in initial public offerings by two SEC staff economists, published in April 2007, found that excessive numbers of fails to deliver were not correlated with naked short selling. The authors of the study said that while the findings in the paper specifically concern IPO trading, "The results presented in this paper also inform a public debate surrounding the role of short selling and fails to deliver in price formation."

In contrast, a study by Leslie Boni in 2004 found correlation between "strategic delivery failures" and the cost of borrowing shares. The paper, which looked at a "unique dataset of the entire cross-section of U.S. equities," credited the initial recognition of strategic delivery fails to Richard Evans, Chris Geczy, David Musto and Adam Reed, and found its review to provide evidence consistent with their hypothesis that "market makers strategically fail to deliver shares when borrowing costs are high." A recent study by Autore, Boulton, and Braga-Alves examines stock returns around delivery failures between 2005 and 2008 and finds evidence consistent with a positive link between delivery failures and borrowing costs.

An April 2007 study conducted for Canadian market regulators by Market Regulation Services Inc. found that fails to deliver securities were not a significant problem on the Canadian market, that "less than 6% of fails resulting from the sale of a security involved short sales" and that "fails involving short sales are projected to account for only 0.07% of total short sales.

A Government Accountability Office study, released in June 2009, found that recent SEC rules had apparently reduced abusive short selling, but that the SEC needed to give clearer guidance to the brokerage industry.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to investigate the 2008 financial crisis, makes no reference to naked shorting, or short-selling of financial stocks, in its conclusions.

Read more about this topic:  Naked Short Selling

Famous quotes containing the word studies:

    The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
    Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)

    ...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if he had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material ...
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)