May 9, 2009
I am in absolute agreement with this proposal, and have said so for several years. Whether a shareholder, institutional buyer, or hedge fund is short or long on a stock, they affect the price. It's a clear double standard, and one that needs to be addressed by requiring registration and full disclosure on short positions as well as long positions. There should also be provisions to address the issue of multiple hedge funds or trading accounts controlled by a single entity or person. If a person owns 100 offshore-based hedge funds and holds a short position in a company's stock in every hedge fund, those positions should be combined when enforcing any future disclosure or registration rules pertaining to short selling. It is past time to clean up our financial markets, and more importantly, to rewrite the regulations and enforcement policies so that our markets will be more fair moving forward.
Mark Faulk