Short Selling Mechanics

The locate process, borrow rates, and recall risk are the three forces that silently define whether a short trade is structurally viable before you ever enter a position.

Short sellers often talk about the idea as the hard part — finding the overextended stock, the fraudulent company, the overcrowded momentum name running on no fundamentals. In practice, the hard part usually comes before the entry: can you actually borrow it? Borrow availability is an execution constraint that gets real at exactly the moments when short-biased traders need it most: momentum squeezes on thin float, catalyst names with sudden interest, Reg SHO threshold-list na