A comment on the post covers that: It's called a "bucket shop", and it's illegal.
Well, this is an awkward moment to be in a car with a connected friend from Adelaide!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
The Wikipedia description of a bucket shop says that it's gambling market on stock prices. The anti-stock idea in the article is a security where the holder is obligated to pay out the same dividends as the underlying stock. Not the same thing, AFAICT.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp
Wall Street already does do this (and basically anything else you can think of that “Wall Street doesn’t do”). There are (at least) two forms. Firstly an Equity Swap[1] and secondly a Total Return Swap[2] (which is just Wall Street’s Swiss army knife tool for synthetically being long/short the return on some asset or basket).
If you just want to long/short the price return (and don’t include dividends which are mentioned in TFA) then there are also contracts for difference (CFDs) where the parties swap the price return on an equity. When I was in this business those were usually used because of tax differences between capital gains and other types of tax.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp refers to it as having an index on one side and a rate on the other side, but there’s no reason not to have a single stock rather than an equity index and we used to do these 15 years ago when I worked in equities
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp
Edit to add: There are also “dividend swaps” where the parties just swap the dividend return on the asset if you only care about that stream. This is sometimes helpful matching investors who have tax or other structural problems with receiving dividends with others who just want a dividend income stream without the asset price risk.
For example, at one point, trading equities via swaps carrier a tax benefit to the end user, at no significant cost to the bank arranging this. Lots of institutions used that for trading. But later, the tax advantage was lost, while banks were forced to treat these swaps as a proper credit liability, thus depleting the pool of available capital. So people stopped doing this.
This is about 10 years outdated so I'm not sure what status quo is, but as a hack, this definitely exists in the US.
(Edit: Context: the movie "The Big Short")
[1]Source: worked at Goldman as a strat (quant developer) on the mortgages desk at the time. I knew and worked with pretty much all of the people involved although I was based in London. The actual person who came up with the research behind the short idea was a fellow strat and brilliant econometrician[3] and most of the trading guys fought him like hell over it only to later found hedge funds and pretend that it was their idea all along.
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp
[3] Michael Marschoun https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michae...
Some more information about available dividend derivatives on EUREX: https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a...
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-s...
Unfortunately it would be hard to collateralize since there is technically no limit to the dividend, similar to a sold call, but just like a sold call you could collateralize with an equivalent sized long position. That could probably be useful for tax optimization (similar to how many of the crypto lending services require full or over collateralization of the underlying, with the market generally being people who want to spend appreciated crypto without realizing a gain). It could also be extremely useful for market making - when you can’t get a share to sell to fill an order, you generate a synthetic long and anti stock, provided you can convince clearing houses you’ll be able to get a real stock to swap with the synthetic.