Albany Molecular Research Inc. Message Board

  • tobeyspaniel tobeyspaniel May 8, 2009 10:45 AM Flag

    Don't margin AMRI

    AMRI is thinly traded and therefore more easily manipulated than stocks with larger volumes.
    I bring this up because of the posts below, where it seems someone is trying to drive the price down, either to buy it at a lower price or because he/she is a short-seller who wants to profit from the decline.
    If we AMRI shareholders don't want to see the stock price swing around wildly, my advice for all of us is not to keep our shares in a margin account, where they can be borrowed by short-sellers.
    Instead, hold them in a non-margin account because they can't be lent out by your broker from such an account.
    Short-selling has the effect of depressing the share price. Here's how it works: they borrow a stock, sell it with the aim of hopefully buying it back at a lower price, and then return it to the rightful owner. But as I say, only stocks held in margin accounts can be borrowed in the first place. So if you hold AMRI in a non-margin account, less shares will be available to be shorted.
    By the way, this is all transparent to you, the owner -- the shares you own still appear on your statements, and if you wanted to do sell them yourself while they were loaned out to a short-seller, the broker would go through backroom maneuvers to accomplish the sale for you and you'd never even know about it.
    So, why make it easy for short-sellers to borrow and short such a thinly traded stock as AMRI? Consider keeping it out of your margin accounts.

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    • Not a realistic idea right now, because the stock is listed on the Options exchange and margin is apart of almost every stock. If you really want to make this stock stable for yourself then cover yourself with options; that's if you can handle it.

      • 1 Reply to grgabby
      • I repeat: short-sellers have to borrow a stock in order to short it, and in order to borrow the stock in the first place, it must be held somewhere in a margin account. If the stock is not held in a margin account, it can't be borrowed and hence can't be shorted. In a thinly traded stock like AMRI this tactic will tend to stablize the price.

        The fact that options on AMRI are available on an options exchange has nothing to do with it. Options are simply contracts people enter into to buy or sell an underlying stock. That's a different thing entirely. Sure, if you want to pay attention to the market all the time you may be able to protect yourself by writing options, but most people are not skillful at it and don't have the time/interest anyway. The easier, no-cost way with a thinly traded stock such as AMRI is simply to hold your shares in a cash account, not in a margin account. Nobody can borrow them from you that way, and without a ready supply of shares avalable to be borrowed and shorted, the price won't swing around so much.

        This tactic doesn't work with companies that trade bilions of shares, such as GE, because there always will be enough shares around for short-sellers to borrow.

        "Naked" shorting is when people sell a stock short which they haven't borrowed first. It's illegal to do that. If the SEC actually did its job, naked short-sellers would be identified and prosecuted.

 
AMRI
11.080.13(+1.19%)May 17 4:00 PMEDT