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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: blankmind who wrote (8763)	5/31/1998 5:39:00 PM
From: AlienTech	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23519

I been checking with a few places, The most notorious would be INCA where you can short on downticks as well. The next one is Datek who seems to always have shares available to short for any security. At least I have not even heard of not being able short ANY security from Datek as long as the price is above 5. Terra Nova went cautious about VVUS last week and from looking at the L2's they are not shorting very much. In fact Merryl lynch is not shorting at all even though before they would short on any day where the price was declyning and then cover later on in the day. Schwab was another big shorter who would constantly short and then wait to cover as the price went up, I personally thought the guy was a nut. Someone else also told me price water house was also out of shares to short. So this leaves very few places left with shares to short, When Datek refuses to short VVUS is when we know things are looking up since then the only ones left would be Reuters who are basically MM's using to manipulate a stock without having to let anyone know what their true identity is. One another thing with using INCA is you dont need to sell your shares for the ask price to someone, You can pick and choose who you want to hit. Also I have noticed this a lot in VVUS, the shorts will buy shares from other shorts and then hit the buyers there by dropping the price. This does cost them money but I would think the people doing this are sitting on so much profits from their short positions that they can easily keep doing this indefinetely since a 1/8 to 1/4 loss per share is nothing since you can drop the price a 1/4 with 5 to 10k shares. I DO THINK! The SEC should investigate this practice and see who is doing the manipulation. The MM's dont really care since they make money on the spreads anyway so as long as the price moves up or down they make their money.