May 6, 2009
I would prefer to see market wide and permanent rules (uptick rule preferrably) put in place to reduce the abuses with short selling. Short selling can enable self-fulling prophecies to occur. By this I mean, that if a company is dependent on customer confidence and that customer confidence can be influcenced by the stock price, as happened with many of the Wall Street firms last summer and fall, short sellers can infinitely target that stock (afterall there is no enforcement of naked short rules) until the stock price faulters and confidence is lost. The uptick rule had restricted this practice very effectively before it was terminated and many times in my investment career I had heard people indentify the uptick rule as one of the reasons preventing a market collapse of the magnitude of the great depression. If you try to place triggers to have the uptick rule kick in, it will be abused, it will be technically more complex, and it will be tougher to enforce. So please reinstate the uptick rule on a market-wide and permanent basis, enforce it, enforce the naked short selling rules and please do something about the insider trading abuses that have sky rocketed over the last several years. Thanks, Jerry