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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nazbuster who wrote (44846)	10/4/1999 1:19:00 AM
From: Mark L.	Respond to of 122087

Re: buy-ins I must ignore 100 of these a year (I have an extensive portfolio of long-term shorts). In the last month I have ignored them in GLXW, LOAX, MRBA, CCSI, ENMD, and AMPD. Nothing has happened in any of those--but my brokers understand that if I get bought in, there better be a hell of a good explanation. If you can get your account labeled an institutional account at a large brokerage firm, that seems to have a positive effect. Evidently the institutional accounts are spared the pain of retail accounts. 95% of my problems occur in my retail accounts. There are seemingly two levels of buy-in notice: one is the routine, the other is serious. For instance, I received about 15 buy-in notices from ETrade on GLXW, which I ignored. Then one day I got a phone call (!) from someone in Stock Loan at ETrade. They wanted me to understand that they had a real problem this time (strangely they never sent me one of their automated buy-in notices on the site). I took the phone call seriously and transferred the short position elsewhere (I literally traded the position--I covered an odd, large number of shares from E*Trade while short-selling the shares from an account at Smith Barney). I almost never see a circumstance where covering in response to a buy-in notice is a good idea. That's not to say that the notices should be totally ignored. They provide valuable information about what's going on in the market. For instance, if you're getting buy-in notices every day on a stock, and you have a current figure for short interest that's modest in relation to the float, that tells you that the stock is probably being heavily shorted overseas.