The penalties are pathetic in most cases. If I fail to deliver $100M in treasuries I'm paying maybe 5K a day.
Folks are playing games under the hood with this. Stock price crashing on some shares you sold? Buy them late and settle late. I'd be curious what happened with FTD on things like bear sterns imploding.
I like how folks keep on assuring us that selling something you don't own is a non-issue :) That's a tell right there on where the morals of wall street are - in the toilet.
We are in 2022. We still have T+2 settlement (in part so folks can shuffle stuff on the backend). T+1 should be an obvious no brainer requirement. And frankly I'd go for gross real time personally - and nuke these firms out of the water including their financing and margin revenues.
It sounds like you have an emotional response to this issue, and so might benefit, mentally if not financially, from demanding special settlement.
It’s not. FTD means failure on a particular timeline. Almost all of those shares get delivered in the end.
> You should not be able to sell something you can't deliver
You can trade this way if you want. It’s special settlement and you’ll pay out the nose [1] for zero benefit. But sometimes people do weird things with derivatives and need instantaneous settlement. So someone (usually a bank) with stock certificates will sell them, zero settlement risk involved, for a premium. (This is what someone facing FTD penalties will eventually have to do.)
FTD is a non-issue. It has zero practical downside. It nevertheless serves as catnip for Redditors trying to redirect blame for their gambling losses.
[1] Out of curiosity, I checked with a former colleague. They said they used to charge a flat fee, but recently switched to match crypto fees, since a lot of crypto people have been looking to instantly settle and they’re used to paying massive transaction costs. TIL.