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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David R who wrote (8613)	1/20/1998 3:35:00 PM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10836

Will somebody explain something basic to a novice at trading please. I looked at the message awhile back on shorts and followed the link to ViWes to check it out. For BORL as of 12/97, it was 4,270,816 shares short compared to avg. volume of 680,598. I take this to mean just what it says, that 4 million more shares have been sold than exist. Now since the law requires trades to be settled in 3 days, I somehow took this to imply a limit on how long stock could be shorted. Like, you sell it, you have to come up with the actual shares in 3 days, and assumed that the borrowing from the broker in shorting was temporary. So how long can a stock really be shorted? Is it indefinitely if one is willing to pay the interest on the margin? And if so, is this assuming that the price of the stock doesn't go up to the point that the debt, that is the amount needed for covering, doesn't exceed the equity requirements for the margin? The amount above is about 10% of the outstanding shares by my reckoning, which is not a trivial amount. Is it to be assumed that most of these short positions are currently "in the money" and will be liquidated by a stop loss order if the stock price starts to rise? The stock seems to have bottomed out for the moment, and it's not all that far above its all-time low. Why would somebody still be sitting on shorts at this time, instead of taking their profit. OK, I realize that the number is for the end of December, not now and maybe some have done exactly that. But looking at several months of data, there was an ongoing and increasing amount of shorts leading up to December. Perhaps an explanation for the high volume and unusual number of limit buys mentioned earlier in this thread can be explained by the mass of shorts being covered?