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Strategies & Market Trends : Floorless Preferred Stock/Debenture -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mst2000 who wrote (901)	8/28/1999 1:08:00 AM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1438

Help me understand something - are you saying that "shorting the hell out of a stock" automatically causes it to drop in price? If so, please explain why that is "always" the outcome of "shorting like hell". Thank you. The word "always" does not appear in my message. There's never a 100% certainty to it because a stock could catch Pokemon Fever and overwhelm the shorting, but a large increase in supply (the large short position being set up) will sop up buyers and drive down the price. If you don't believe that heavy shorting will drive the price of a stock down then you must conversely deny the reality that heavy short covering will drive the price up, right? If you don't believe that a large increase in supply will drive the price of something down then you must not believe that a large increase in demand will drive it up, either. Of course, in the US one can only short on upticks so the shorters can't pummel the price without mercy like they can on many foreign exchanges, at least if you follow the rules. But the types of people who "finance" a company in order to intentionally wreck it to make a buck don't seem to me to type of people who would pay close attention to rules, except the ones they write into the convertibles that they use. I didn't post my message as a prediction but as one conceivable "convoluted" scenario. It's probably too convoluted to work, but do you deny that if the price is driven down and then ran up so that the lowest-five-of-the-last-22-days price is significanly below the closing price on the conversion day that the current-price-times-the-shares-that-would-have-been-issued would be a large number, likely larger than the company would be willing to pay to avoid dilution? I have no position in ASTN, short or long, and don't have an interest in taking one, but it seems to me that the ASTN thread is hostile enough to raise red flags and I'd be uncomfortable being long the stock because of it. Herb Greenberg uses the "hostile-o-meter" reaction to his TheStreet.Com columns as a confirming indicator. The more the longs are rabid "believers" instead of cool investors the greater the chance for a fall. In retrospect I can see that this is absolutely true because I was a suckered IPMCF "believer." We were so good with name calling and verbal (written?) sparring with the shorters, but in the end our belief and hostility didn't help the stock. Fortunately I didn't lose much on it.