short seller

noun

, Finance.

1. a person, as a speculator, who sells short.

Other Words From

• short selling noun

Example Sentences

Last year, Hindenburg Research, an activist short seller, accused the conglomerate of orchestrating “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme.”

From New York Times

Hindenburg Research, a short seller that makes money by betting that stocks will drop, published these claims in a scathing report, which pummeled the prices of Mr. Adani’s stocks and bonds.

From New York Times

In this scenario, the short seller makes a bank vault of cash while the loyal Trump supporter who held onto their shares gets wiped out.

From Salon

Since going public nearly two years ago, the members club chain Soho House has endured a sharp decline in its stock price, economic turmoil and a short seller declaring that its shares are worthless.

From New York Times

Despite Adani's denials, the short seller's report triggered a $150 billion plunge in the group's stocks.

From Reuters

More About Short Seller

What is a short seller?

There are a lot of complicated ways to make money on the stock market, and a lot of complicated terms to describe them. Nonexperts can profit from some basic definitions, so let’s jump in.

One of the most basic stock investment strategies is known as a long position. This is basically when you buy shares of a stock, wait (sometimes for a long time) for them to increase in price, and then sell them, resulting in a profit—a.k.a. “buy low, sell high.”

But there are also ways to make money from a stock decreasing in price. One common strategy is to be a short seller, which is an investor who engages in short selling—a risky investment strategy that involves borrowing shares of stock, selling them, buying them back at a lower price, and then returning them, keeping the profit from the difference. This transaction is known as a short sale. Short selling is also known as selling (a stock) short or shorting a stock. 

Short selling is basically betting that a particular stock price will fall. Let’s break the process down into simple steps to make it easier to understand how short selling works. First, the short seller borrows shares of stock from a stockbroker, under the conditions that the short seller will return them on a certain date. Then, the short seller quickly sells the shares to a buyer at the current market price. The short seller then waits for the price of the stock to decrease. If (and it’s a big if) and when the price decreases to a level that the short seller is happy with, the short seller then buys the same amount of shares at the new, lower price. Finally, the short seller returns the same amount of shares that they borrowed to the broker. At this point, the short sale is complete. The short seller earns a profit from the difference between the amount they originally sold the shares for and the amount they bought them back for.

Stock trading always includes some risk. For example, when you take a long position on a stock in the hopes that its price will increase and you can sell the shares at a profit, there’s no guarantee that it will increase in price. But your risk in this case is limited to the amount you originally paid for the shares.

In contrast, short selling is infinitely riskier because of the possibility that the stock might increase in price, forcing the short seller—who is required to buy it back and return it by a certain date—to pay extreme amounts in order to meet these requirements. For this reason, the risk is literally unlimited.

One of the worst case scenarios for a short seller is to get caught in what’s called a short squeeze. What is a short squeeze? To understand it, you first need to remember that short selling requires the short seller to wait for the price to go down before buying back shares in order to return them. But what happens when the price goes up, and keeps going up? If the deadline for the return of the shares is approaching, the short seller is forced to buy the shares at the increased price before it surges even higher. The short seller is being pressured (“squeezed”) into buying the stock, most likely at a big loss. Sometimes, a short squeeze is the result of a coordinated effort by some investors to buy large amounts of a stock that has been the target of short selling, thus driving the price up and up, due to the demand from the short sellers to buy it back.

This use of the word short in the context of stock trading dates back to the mid-1800s. In this context, the word short was originally used in the sense of a person selling stock that they didn’t actually have. They were short of stock in the same way a person is said to be short (or short of cash) when they don’t have enough money to pay for something.

Example of a short seller:

You’ve been doing your research, and you think that BiffCo Enterprises is going to have a poor quarter for profits, resulting in a decrease in its stock price. So you decide to become a short seller. Through a broker, you borrow 100 shares of BiffCo stock, which is currently selling for $3 a share. Then, you quickly sell those 100 shares to a buyer for $300. Then you wait, closely watching the price of BiffCo shares. You were right—their share price dropped to $1 per share. You now buy back 100 shares of BiffCo stock for $100, return them to the broker, and pocket the remaining $200 in profit from the short sale.

Short seller used in a sentence: Short sellers have been betting that brick-and-mortar retail stores will fail. 

What are some other forms related to short seller?

• short sale
• short selling
• selling short
• sell short

Why is short seller trending?

The term short seller started trending in January 2021 as a result of a short squeeze caused by investors buying large amounts of stock in GameStop (stock abbrev.: GME), a company that owns a chain of video games retail stores. Due to the shift to online shopping and digital markets, the companies behind brick-and-mortar stores like GameStop are often seen as being in decline. This has made their stock a target for short sellers, in particular major hedge funds—investment firms that specialize in high-risk investment strategies like short selling.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Some stock trading enthusiasts became aware of some hedge funds’ short selling of GameStop and other stocks and decided to take the risky move of trying to exploit those positions. This effort was led by a community of amateur stock traders on the social media site Reddit, specifically the subreddit (forum) /r/WallStreetBets. Their plan involved buying large amounts of GameStop stock, using online trading platforms such as Robinhood. The sudden buying spree caused GameStop stock to quickly rocket upward in price. The result was a short squeeze, in which the price continued to climb as short sellers (notably the hedge funds) desperately tried to buy back shares before the price increased even more.

This situation continued to escalate and gain mainstream attention, causing GameStop stock to become widely discussed as a “meme stock”—one that has seen an increase in trading activity after gaining popularity due to some online trend, as if the stock has gone viral. Traders then began buying shares in other companies that hedge funds had targeted as safe bets for short selling, including AMC Entertainment (AMC), Nokia (NOK), Naked Brand Group (NAKD), and Bed Bath and Beyond (BBBY).