The SEC Wants Investors to Stop Buying the Wrong Zoom Stock

Re:The SEC Wants Investors to Stop Buying the Wrong Zoom Sto... by mardifoufs on Sunday March 29, 2020 @07:24PM (#22723687)

Would it have been rational to be short though? If people confused it for the real thing before you shorted the stock, why would one assume people won't keep making that mistake? It is obvious that anyone who buys the wrong stock because of the ticker has low or no information about the stock so what could make that change? So even if the current investors realize their mistake, there's no reason to believe more badly informed played won't keep buying.

Shorting a stock is only profitable if it has at least some informed shareholders that will react rationally when confronted with negative changes by selling their stakes. On the other hand, shorting a stock inherently full of irrational players and speculators trying to profit from them is contradictory, because you are betting on (deeply) irrational players being rational.

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Re:The SEC Wants Investors to Stop Buying the Wrong Zoom Sto... by asdfasgasdgasdg on Sunday March 29, 2020 @08:19PM (#22724028)

The way this usually works is someone buys a really large short position at a good price and then publicizes true information that convinces at least some long traders to sell their positions.

There's also some question to me how much liquidity there is here. Their volume isn't tiny (at least according to Yahoo Finance) but I don't actually know how many shares are trading hands. There might not be a deep enough book to make it worth making the trades.

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Re:The SEC Wants Investors to Stop Buying the Wrong Zoom Sto... by mardifoufs on Sunday March 29, 2020 @11:39PM (#22725023)

Yep but that's my point! Odds are, if you can't even bother checking if you are buying the right stock beyond looking at the ticker, you won't know about a short seller publicly announcing it's short position.

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