Re:Short sellers are good for markets
by romed on Saturday October 13, 2018 @01:36PM
(#18209052)
In practice, it is far, far more common for bad actors to run the pump and dump than to short and issue fake news. The latter is rare enough that we don't have a word for it. The former is common enough to be called "pump and dump". There's a good reason why shorting is not a common scam technique: your gains are capped at 100% and your risk is unlimited. On the long side, it's the opposite. A pump-and-dump has unlimited upside and the you can only lose 100%.
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The short version is called short and distort. I'd like to see stats on which is more common.
I was an investment professional from 2001 to 2009 and I never heard anyone say "short and distort".
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22pump+and+du...
"Ngram not found: short and distort"
Perhaps it's a newer term. Now "short and distort" is around, for instance prominently as section 3 in the wikipedia article on "pump and dump" [0], and investopedia [1] also describe it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortanddistort.asp