this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
1020 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59568 readers
4064 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not true
It is true.
You buy a stock for $30. At worst it gets to $1 and you lose $29.
You short a stock for $30. There is no upper limit to how high it can go.
Yeah, if there's a "Superstonk" style event, the shares might jump to $1000 per share.
Say you shorted 100 shares. If you shorted it at $30, the absolute maximum you could make is just under $30 per share, or $3000. But, if it jumps to $1000 per share, you would lose $970 per share, and owe $97,000.
Maybe it's not technically possible for there to be "no upper limit" to what you could lose, but you could easily lose many multiples of the maximum possible gain.
In theory that’s true but you’ll get liquidated at some point.
No. There are lots of ways to short a stock which just means betting that a stock will fall. If you buy Puts you go short, you can only lose the money you spent on the Puts. What you are talking about is unhedged short selling but that is far from the only method to short a stock.