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Short Selling Guides

How short selling works in Australia: reading ASIC's daily reports, the metrics that matter, what a short position costs to hold, and how squeezes and activist campaigns actually play out.

14 articles

  • Guides10 min read

    A Stock Picker for the ASX: Dan Zanger's Breakout Rules, Tested Against Real Data

    Shorted's new stock picker runs four named strategies over every ASX stock we track, starting with Dan Zanger's breakout method. Every rule is scored pass, fail or unknown against published data: ASIC short positions, daily prices and volume, the S&P/ASX 200 trend and newly typed company fundamentals. Here is what each rule tests, where the numbers come from, and what the picker cannot see.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides14 min read

    Activist Short Sellers on the ASX: The Major Campaigns and What Happened Next

    Glaucus, Bonitas, VGI. A short report can take a third off an ASX company in a session, and Australian outcomes have run the full range from vindication to a Supreme Court finding of misleading conduct. Here's what activist shorting is, what ASIC's INFO 255 asks of everyone involved, and how the landmark campaigns actually resolved.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides12 min read

    ASX Reporting Season and Short Sellers: What August Does to Crowded Shorts

    Australian reporting season compresses hundreds of results into a few weeks in February and August. For heavily shorted stocks it is the window where a thesis either gets confirmed or gets run over, and ASIC's four-day reporting lag means you watch the covering arrive after the fact. Here is how the season works and how to read short data through it.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides12 min read

    The Most Shorted ASX Sectors: Where Short Interest Concentrates and Why

    Short interest on the ASX is not spread evenly. It piles into materials, energy and a handful of consumer and healthcare names, and it rotates as commodity cycles turn. Here's how sector-level short interest is actually constructed, what drives it, and how to read the industry view without being misled by a handful of microcaps.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides11 min read

    Days to Cover on the ASX: What the Short Interest Ratio Actually Tells You

    Days to cover measures how long the shorts would need to exit at normal trading volume. It's the metric that separates a crowded short you can walk away from and one that's trapped. Here's the formula, ASX-calibrated bands, and what ASIC's T+4 reporting does to the calculation.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides13 min read

    Do Short Sellers Actually Know Something? What the Evidence Says

    Short selling is expensive, risky and asymmetric, which is why the positions that survive tend to be well researched. The academic record broadly agrees that short sellers are informed. But the strongest results are about the whole market rather than individual stocks, and the cross-sectional evidence has a robustness problem worth understanding before you trade on it.

    Ben Ebsworth
  • Guides15 min read

    How to Short a Stock in Australia: Brokers, CFDs, Options and Inverse ETFs Compared

    There are four practical ways to take short exposure to Australian shares, and they differ far more in risk and structure than in headline cost. Here's how covered short selling works under the Corporations Act, what ASIC's CFD rules actually restrict, where options and inverse ETFs fit, and how to check where the crowd already is before you commit.

    Ben Ebsworth

All articles · Short positions come from ASIC’s daily reports with a T+4 trading-day delay, and nothing here is financial advice.