Batman Strikes – Some Thoughts On Short Sellers

In the bad old days of the 2008 Crisis, a casual reader of the financial news might have been fooled into thinking that “short-sellers,” those financial firms that bet on the price of some financial instrument (like a stock, or bond, or currency, or commodity) going down, rather than up, ranked on the financial attractiveness scale somewhere between Renee Zellwegger and Quasimodo – simpering, disfigured, unpatriotic, and untrustworthy.

For a brief time in the midst of the October 2008 panic, the financial regulators nearly outlawed short-sellers, as if there was some moral difference between short sellers and their counterparts “long buyers.” (We don’t refer to them of course as “long buyers” but rather ”investors,’ but finance folks do use the ‘shorts’ and ‘longs’ monikers when describing market participants.)

Only people who have never participated in financial markets could reasonably argue that ‘short selling’ has any better or worse effect on markets than ‘long buying.’ In fact, brokering most markets absolutely requires short selling, both to offer a product to a client that the broker does not currently have in inventory, as well as to hedge purchases from a client that a broker can not immediately dispose of in the market.

When a client needs to sell a block of a stock, or a pile of bonds, the broker will often sell (sometimes selling short) a similar-characteristic block of stocks or bonds right away, to minimize the risk of holding the client’s recently dumped position, if the market goes down. The ability to sell short, for a hedge, is a key tool in the arsenal of brokers.

Short-selling by hedge funds

The ability to short sell is also the fundamental differentiating tool of 80% of hedge funds vis-a-vis mutual funds: Namely, the former can sell short a stock (or bond, or currency, or commodity) whereas a traditional mutual fund may only deploy money on the ‘long’ side, but buying a financial product. Financial products tend to go both down and up, but your typical mutual fund may only be able to deliver a positive return when the markets go up in aggregate.