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root strategies
Short Shares
Analyzing the risk profile of a short share position
Borrowing And Interest Payments
In order to sell short shares, you must borrow them from someone else. Your brokerage firm should be able to track down any available shares for you. Some products are easier to borrow than others and are grouped into different categories: Easy to Borrow (ETB), Hard to Borrow (HTB), and None to Borrow (NTB). Depending on the difficulty of acquiring the shares, interest rates can be very low to astronomically high. Generally, shares of newly public companies and high demand products are most likely to fall into the HTB or NTB group. Be aware of the cost of interest... in some of the most extreme cases it can get up to 300-400% or higher, per day! It's not common for rates to get that large, but it certainly does happen.
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