BIDU Stock Box Showing No Shares Available to Borrow
Posted on September 16th, 2005 in Stock Market
Here’s a shot of the CyberTrader ’stock box’ for BIDU. At the time I took this snapshot there were no shares of BIDU available. Note my current short position is displayed in the upper right corner.
Update: I was hoping this image would appear here with the notes that I made over on Flickr. If you click the image you’ll be able to see my annotations when you move your cursor over the image.
Tags: CyberTrader, Short Selling
This post has 3 comments
September 17th, 2005
Mike,
I am thinking of switching from Ameritrade. I am looking for lower fees and a DT friendly broker.
Question about CyberTrader: Is it possible to change directions on a position. ie, I am long 100 shares and want to go short, could I then sell 200 shares for one fee and then be short 100? This would greatly reduce my fees as I often switch positions right away.
Thoughts?
SD Trader a.k.a. Stock Hustle
September 17th, 2005
SD, I think you can only do that if you’re trading futures. See that ‘reverse’ button? That’s what it’s for but only for futures. I just tried to do what you described in demo mode and it only closed out the original position. It canceled the sell of the other 200 shares. Keep in mind though, that if you go to per-share pricing it really won’t matter that much commission-wise if you do one or two orders to get short. They currently charge $0.006/share with a minimum commission of a dollar. So in the situation you describe you’d pay $1.20 if you could reverse in one order. Doing it with 2 orders would cost you $2.00.
Cyber has a free simulator that you can download to get a feel for their system. If you decide to sign up with them please let me know. I can give you my information to use as a reference and we’ll both get some (25, I believe) free trades out of the deal.
September 18th, 2005
Yeah, I think most of the people who had BIDU long before the gap down sold off their shares (especially the ones that they bought using margin) and thus it was pretty hard to find margined shares to short it.
Moreover, I think the result of the downgrade worked to eliminate all the recent gains from the $70s area before the spike up due to the SOHU acquisition. Therefore, it’s sitting near that level and should slowly stabilize itself and likely not bust another 10%+ fall in the nearterm , but it will decide a new direction of movement.