short-selling and its applications on the Saudi Arabia Stock Exchange Fiqhi Authentication study

Research Subject: short-selling and its applications on the Saudi Arabia Stock Exchange. Fiqhi Authentication study Research Objectives: - Clarifying the short-selling and its applications on the Saudi Arabia Stock Exchange. - Alternatives to Short-selling Research Methodology: Analytical Descriptive. The most important findings. There is a distinction between naked short-selling – the selling of stocks that the person “does not own” or without first obtaining approval for borrowing them – and the regular short-selling where an investor sells stocks borrowed from its owner and return them back later after a certain time – covered shorting. Regular short-selling is a combined contract of sale and loan transactions, where the loan is set against a certain dividends to the borrower to be paid to the broker. There is a number of alternatives to short-selling such as: put options and inverse exchange-traded funds.

Accounting irregularities and failure to deliver

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naked short selling and accounting irregularities that cause a firm to issue a restatement. Design/methodology/approach – Using the level of abnormal fails-to-deliver as a proxy for naked short selling, the paper looks for evidence of increased naked short selling in anticipation of, as well as in response to these announcements. Findings – Larger firms and firms with a higher percentage of institutional ownership experience greater levels of fails prior to the announcement day, while smaller firms are more likely to be targets of naked short sellers after the announcement. The paper also finds that more transparent announcements are associated with more abnormal fails. Originality/value – This paper is the first research to study the relation between naked short selling and accounting restatements.

Short‐sell moratorium effects on regional bank performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the 2008 SEC short‐sell moratorium on regional bank risk and return. The paper also examines the decline in “failures to deliver” securities in the wake of SEC short‐sell moratorium.Design/methodology/approachIn total, six regional bank portfolios are derived and the beta coefficients from a CAPM model are estimated using the integrated generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (IGARCH) method accounting for the short‐sell moratorium. Data on 110 regional banks in six US regions from January 2002 to December 30, 2011 are used to estimate the model.FindingsThe ban on naked short selling and the SEC short‐sell moratorium significantly increased individual bank risk for a majority of banks in six geographic regions, but also increased return in three of three regions. There was also reduced naked short selling as failures to deliver securities declined sharply after the September 2008 moratorium took effect.Originality/valueRegional banks have generally not achieved the size needed to be deemed “too big to fail” by policy‐makers. Thus, policy changes such as the SEC short‐sell moratorium might be expected to have larger effects on regional banks than on larger banks, which might be shielded from the policy change by having achieved “too big to fail” status. The authors' results are consistent with research that has shown that short‐sell restrictions increase risk by reducing liquidity and trading volume.