Brant Gaede

The shirts may have been put on over a considerable period of time with little effect on price. When the shit hits the fan then it's a rush to cover. Prices are short term frequently psychological and not so mechanical or as efficient as you seem to imply. --Brant

Okay, I get your point. The shorting has turned 10 shares into 11. The extra share disappears when the position is closed. The extra share is artificial and potentially very dangerous to the shorter. He has to buy a real share to cover. --Brant

The dividends go to the actual owner of the stock albeit in a roundabout way. I cannot speak to the back office technicalities involved. However, the actual owner of shorted stock is the clearing house. When you look at your brokerage statement it shows you own x, y and z shares but you don't. Your broker doesn't have them, which is a good thing for if the broker goes bankrupt those shares are "safe" elsewhere. If I recall correctly some many years ago there was bad trouble with a major clearing house and Wall Street jumped in with both feet to keep the situation from getting out of hand. --Brant

At X point of time there are 11 owners of 10 shares? --Brant is it Miller time yet?

When you short a stock you don't own it. Owners don't short what they own. I live in a house. I can't borrow it burn it down and make money outside of criminal and financial fraud. Borrowing what you own is a contradiction. Good try, Jon, but now the discussion is semantcal. --Brant nothing was sold to the short seller but the right to buy, but not the right to buy at a set price; that's the realm of options; that right to buy may not be exercisable in the ten share company so millions of trading shares are needed in markets or the shorts are never put on--even so the short seller can be destroyed in a short squeeze so he might buy call options to protect his position

A stock certificate of a public company is title by an owner of a percentage of the business. If held by a clearing house it may be lent out by same to a brokerage for shorting. If the owner takes possession of the actual certificate it can't be lent. If I short a stock at $100/share and the market price goes to $200 and I close the position the brokerage will remove $100 from my account and return the stock to the clearing house. What has changed in all this is possession, not ownership. If the stock price goes to zero and I close the position the brokerage returns it to the clearing house and credits my account for $100. It's a fallacy to assume stock shorting is gambling though it can be for gamblers. Shorting can stabilize the value of a stock when a company comes with bad news. The price pluments then the shorters rush to cover their positions by buying it. Then the news turns out to be not so bad and the price goes back up. Shorting dampens overall market volatility, especially potential volatility, and makes actual stock ownership more attractive. --Brant

More crap from CNN. Crap has become the CNN default so unless it's gone through a crap filter it's crap. --Brant

This is the wrong war--the war on drugs--and it can't be/won't be won. Gene AUTRY was the 1920s greatest selling recording artist. --Brant

Shorted stocks are borrowed stocks and the owner never cashes them out because they were shorted. --Brant

Good God! --Brant and Doris Gordon's been a long time gone--I suspect deceased

A house is an asset--until it burns down. --Brant

A stock is an asset. --Brant

When Rand was getting back at Branden (1968) she stated that Objectivism would destroy those who didn't totally embrace it. Or, don't accept it halfway. It's its own avenger. But to get blown out of her context made Nathaniel a new and happy free man. Objectivism in the 1960s a la Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden et al. was a powerful intellectual and cultural force off Atlas Shrugged and through NBI. But it was of its time and had no legs except as it informed individual lives, mostly for the good and sometimes not. Part of the reason is Rand and Branden were an intellectual power couple. Another is 80 Ayn Rand type campus clubs listening to sundry NBI lecture courses via tape subscription. It wasn't just intellectual, it was quasi religious. I remember a tape machine recorder/player on a white tablecloth altar here in Tucson and several rows of seats occupied by students of Objectivism--if we called ourselves anything--then I decamped for New York and everything went on steroids. BTW she was right, but it was HER Objectivism she was talking about. The one it took Leonard Peikoff 30 or 40 years to not quite master. Nathaniel took quite a bit less. But Objectivism as its own avenger is a gun that shoots back at the shooter. That Objectivism is the wrong Objectivism. It's reality that does the avenging. It's Objectivism a la Rand brokering reality that avenged. Rand congruence is not reality congruence. That's assessing the wrong book. --Brant

Pray away my prey. Pray away. --Brant quo vadis, Objectivism, quo vadis?

The stupidest bumper sticker, and on a Prius, I ever saw (two days ago): "If you're against socialism get off my public roads". --Brant

We'll take Alberta if Canada takes California. --Brant

Most of her life. We just wrote her biography. --Brant

l think Rand's big problem in the 1960s was she wasn't getting laid. The big problem behind that was her rationalizing her romantic relationships and making it stick. --Brant

I agreed with Rand then and agree again 40 years later. Why do TV to be gratuitously insulted? I mean, WTF is your question? --Brant

Her lawyer may have done some threatening. One gets the impression she had no idea about subjective esthetic appreciation when it came to her opinions about art. Instead she used "sense of life." Everything had to be objectified. --Brant

Trump will take this Impeachment crap and run the Democrats into the ground with it next year. --Brant

Kay died in 1993 from lung cancer. Her husband Phillip was my acting teacher and, if still alive, which I doubt, would be in his early 90s. They did Night of January 16 as Penthouse Legend in 1973 using the original script. She played the protagonist. As a production it was under-financed, but I liked it. They made a theater for it on top of the McAlpin hotel. Kay wrote quite a few novels and the next to last one set in France in the early to mid-1800s was by far the best. Sorry, but I forget the title. They were not method actors so they really had to act and they were really very good. --Brant

Rand lacked many common sensibilities. That's why her two great novels need to be deconstructed and reconstructed for the human world we all live in. Such was completely beyond her and why she never transitioned Atlas Shrugged. She created that world and never left it. The terrible and great power of her Magnum Opus is tremendously seductive. What's fascinating esthetically about Atlas is how it's painting by the numbers, but that only makes it even greater. Qua painting that's impossible; it's less than mediocre. In conclusion, Atlas is incomplete. However, iIt's not any kind of dead end except to dead brains. --Brant

Rand made sausage. Bismark said you don't want to see sausage being made or legislation. --Brant

Marion was the little girl Hickman murdered. --Brant