Short Selling: Your Step-by-Step Guide for Shorting Stocks

Short selling is a trading strategy where investors speculate on a stock's decline. Short sellers bet on, and profit from a drop in a security’s price. Traders use short selling as speculation, and investors or portfolio managers may use it as a hedge against the downside risk of a long position.

How Shorting a Stock Works

Traders commonly engage in short selling for speculation and hedging. To open a short position, a trader must have a margin account and pay interest on the value of the borrowed shares while the position is open.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which enforces the rules and regulations governing registered brokers and broker-dealer firms in the United States, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the Federal Reserve have set minimum values for the amount that the margin account must maintain—known as the maintenance margin.

A broker locates shares that can be borrowed and returns them at the end of the trade. Opening and closing the trade can be done through regular trading platforms with brokers qualified to perform margin trading.

A step-by-step process for short selling

To short-sell, traders commonly follow these steps:

Step 1 - Open a margin account: Before they engage in short selling, traders open a margin account with a broker so that they will be able to borrow shares. Margin accounts require minimum balances, called the maintenance margin, which is used to cover potential losses. The broker charges interest on the borrowed shares while short positions remain open.

Step 2 - Identify a stock to short: Next, traders identify stocks that they believe will decline in value by analyzing financial reports, industry trends, technical indicators, or broad market sentiment. This involves speculation based on the expectation that the stock's price will drop, allowing the trader to profit by buying it back later at a lower price.

Step 3 - Locate borrowable shares: Before the trader can short-sell, the broker must locate shares that can be borrowed. Brokerage firms now handle this process automatically, finding shares from other clients' accounts or even institutional lenders.

Step 4 - Place the short sale order: More than likely, the shares will be available on the brokerage platform, or a list of shares that can be shorted will be made available to the trader. The trader enters a market order or a limit order to short the stock.

Step 5 - Monitor the position: After opening the short position, experienced traders actively monitor the market and the stock's performance. Since the trader sold borrowed shares, they're expecting the stock price to decline so that they can repurchase the stock at a lower price. However, if the stock price increases, their losses can grow. In theory, there is no limit to how high a stock price can rise. Traders also need to account for any interest charges on the borrowed shares and keep track of the margin requirements.

Step 6 - Close the short position: To close the short position, traders must buy back the borrowed shares and return them to the lender. This is known as covering the short. Ideally, the shares are repurchased at a lower price than what the trader sold them for, allowing the trader to keep the difference as profit, less interest charges and commissions. Closing the short position can be achieved by entering a buy order on the brokerage platform for the same number of shares that were sold short.

Step 7 - Review the trade outcome: Experienced traders review the outcome of the transaction after the position is closed. Analyzing the trade's success or failure helps the trader refine their strategy for future short-selling opportunities.

How to Time a Short Sale

Timing is crucial when it comes to short selling. Stocks typically decline much faster than they advance, and a sizable gain in the stock may be wiped out with an earnings miss or other bearish development. Conversely, entering the trade too early may make it difficult to hold on to the short position in light of the costs involved and potential losses, which rise if the stock increases rapidly. Short sellers commonly look for opportunities during the following conditions:

• Bear Market: Traders who believe that “the trend is your friend” have a better chance of making profitable short-sale trades during an entrenched bear market than they would during a strong bull phase. Short sellers revel in environments where the market decline is swift, broad, and deep, to make windfall profits during such times.
• Decline in Fundamentals: A stock’s fundamentals can deteriorate for several reasons—slowing revenue or profit growth, increasing challenges to the business, and rising input costs that pressure margins. Worsening fundamentals could indicate an economic slowdown, adverse geopolitical developments like a threat of war, or bearish technical signals like new highs on decreasing volume.
• Bearish Technical Indicators: Short sales may succeed when technical indicators confirm the bearish trend. These indicators could include a breakdown below a key long-term support level or a bearish moving average crossover like the death cross. An example of a bearish moving average crossover occurs when a stock’s 50-day moving average falls below its 200-day moving average. A moving average is merely the average of a stock’s price over a set period. If the current price breaks the average, either down or up, it can signal a new trend in price.
• High Valuations: Occasionally, valuations for certain sectors or the market as a whole may reach highly elevated levels amid rampant optimism for the long-term prospects of such sectors or the broad economy. Market professionals call this phase of the investment cycle “priced for perfection,” since investors will invariably be disappointed at some point when their lofty expectations are not met. Rather than rushing in on the short side, experienced short sellers may wait until the market or sector rolls over and commences its downward phase.
  

Short Selling Costs

Unlike buying and holding stocks or investments, short selling involves significant costs in addition to the usual trading commissions paid to brokers. Some costs include: 

• Margin Interest: Since short sales can only be made via margin accounts, the interest payable on short trades can add up, especially if short positions are kept open over an extended period.
  
• Stock Borrowing Costs: Shares that are difficult to borrow—because of high short interest, limited float, or any other reason—have “hard-to-borrow” fees that can be substantial. The fee is based on an annualized rate that can range from a small fraction of a percent to more than 100% of the value of the short trade and is prorated for the number of days that the short trade is open. The broker-dealer usually assesses the fee to the client’s account.
• Dividends and Other Costs: The short seller is responsible for making dividend payments on the shorted stock to the entity from which the stock was borrowed. For shorted bonds, they must pay the lender the coupon or interest owed.

Short Selling Strategies

Profit

Imagine a trader who believes that XYZ stock—currently trading at $50—will decline in price in the next three months. They borrow 100 shares and sell them to another investor. The trader is now “short” 100 shares since they sold something they did not own but had borrowed.

A week later, the company whose shares were shorted reports dismal financial quarterly results, and the stock falls to $40. The trader closes the short position and buys 100 shares for $40 on the open market to replace the borrowed shares. The trader’s profit on the short sale, excluding commissions and interest on the margin account, is $1,000, based on the following calculations: $50 - $40 = $10 and $10 x 100 shares = $1,000.

Loss

Using the scenario above, suppose the trader did not close out the short position at $40 but decided to leave it open to capitalize on a further price decline. However, a competitor swoops in to acquire the company with a takeover offer of $65 per share, and the stock soars.

If the trader decides to close the short position at $65, the loss on the short sale would be $1,500, based on the following calculations: $50 - $65 = negative $15, and negative $15 × 100 shares = $1,500 loss. In this case, the trader had to buy back the shares at a significantly higher price to cover their position.

Hedge

The primary objective of hedging is protection, as opposed to the profit motivation of speculation. Hedging aims to protect gains or mitigate losses in a portfolio. The costs of hedging are twofold. There’s the actual cost of putting on the hedge, such as the expenses associated with short sales, or the premiums paid for protective options contracts.

Also, there’s the opportunity cost of capping the portfolio’s upside if markets continue higher. If 50% of a portfolio with a close correlation to the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500) is hedged, and the index moves up 15% over the next 12 months, the portfolio would only record approximately half of that gain, or 7.5%.

Advantages and Disadvantages

If the seller predicts the price moves correctly, they can make a positive return on investment, primarily if they use margin to initiate the trade. Using margin provides leverage, which means the trader does not need to put up much of their capital as an initial investment. If done carefully, short selling can be an inexpensive hedge, a counterbalance to other portfolio holdings.

A trader who has shorted stock can lose much more than 100% of their original investment. The risk comes because there is no ceiling for a stock’s price. Also, while the stocks were held, the trader had to fund the margin account. When it comes time to close a position, a short seller might have trouble finding enough shares to buy—if many other traders are shorting the stock or the stock is thinly traded.

Conversely, sellers can get caught in a short squeeze loop if the market, or a particular stock, starts to skyrocket. A short squeeze happens when a stock rises, and short sellers cover their trades by buying back their short positions.

Regulations

Each country sets restrictions and regulates short-selling in its markets. In the U.S., short selling is regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Regulation SHO, implemented in 2005, is the primary rule governing short selling that mandates short sales can only be executed in a tick-up or zero-plus tick market, meaning the security price must be moving upward at the time of the short sale.

According to Regulation SHO, brokers must locate a party willing to lend the shorted shares, or they must have reasonable grounds to believe that the shares could be borrowed. This prevents naked short selling, where investors sell shares they have not borrowed.The SEC can impose temporary short-selling bans on specific stocks under certain conditions, such as extreme market volatility.

In October 2023, the SEC added regulations requiring investors to report their short positions to the SEC and companies that lend shares for short selling to report this activity to FINRA. These new rules come after increased scrutiny of short selling, particularly following the GameStop (GME) meme stock saga in 2021, when retail investors drove up the stock price, causing losses for hedge funds that had shorted the company.

Short Selling Example

Unexpected news events can initiate a short squeeze, forcing short sellers to buy at any price to cover their margin requirements. In October 2008, due to a short squeeze, Volkswagen briefly became the most valuable publicly traded company.

In 2008, investors knew that Porsche was trying to build a position in Volkswagen and gain majority control. Short sellers expected that once Porsche had achieved control over the company, the stock would likely fall in value, so they heavily shorted the stock. However, in a surprise announcement, Porsche revealed that they had secretly acquired more than 70% of the company using derivatives, which triggered a massive feedback loop of short sellers buying shares to close their position.

Short sellers were at a disadvantage because 20% of Volkswagen was owned by a government entity that wasn’t interested in selling, and Porsche controlled another 70%, so there were very few shares available on the market to buy back the stock. Essentially, both the short interest and days-to-cover ratio exploded overnight, which caused the stock price to jump from the low €200s to more than €1,000.

The Bottom Line

Short selling allows investors and traders to make money from a down market. Those with a bearish view can borrow shares on margin and sell them in the market, hoping to repurchase them at some point in the future at a lower price. While some have criticized short selling as a bet against the market, many economists believe that the ability to sell short makes markets more efficient and can be a stabilizing force.