Quote from sprstpd:
I know you are but what am I?
LOL. Well you are a bit naive and show signs of an amateur, but you do make a valid point that is being somewhat ignored. The reality is that almost all of these naked short companies are not exactly grade A stock, far from it. OSTK is not worth 70 bucks a share or anywhere worth it. The naked shorts do target questionable companies, which often are manipulated to the upside in the first place. Actually, naked shorts like companies that are more likely failures than successes, or at least seem that way at the time.
That being said, you do lack any understanding of borrowing costs and finance alternatives for publically traded companies. I would suggest reading Soros' "Alchemy of Finance", but it is a tough read and I think you lack the critical thinking to understand his theory of reflexivity. The reality is that a sharp & dramatic drop in price does affect the company's actual business in a negative way. Ideally, it should not, but it does, that's just how people think in this Wall Street glorified rah rah CNBC society. I don't think I need to go into exact examples, you should be able to figure it out. It does take time to get a business up and running, being naked shorted to artificially low prices is certainly not a help.
What's interesting is that I had a discussion with someone about 1-2 years ago. My argument was that these were phantom shares being executed, they do not exist so it's manipulation. He said, well what if someone on the other side wanted to buy more shares than there are and kept driving up the price. My only real response was that the buyer would never be executed, while these naked shorts are getting effective executions and causing downticks. He replied with, "well what if the buyer put in an absurd bid and kept moving it up?". So it becomes a capitalization issue, in reality. Naked shorting VLO into the ground would be quite a feat, as almost every major institution owns that stock and at some price, a serious investor would acquire a controlling stake and would either take it private or move for liquidation. But OSTK and TASR, ehh, apparently no big money feels that strong about those two "gems".
In conclusion, one needs to learn about US stock market history, particularly the 1930s days of JPMorgan & gang when they destroyed any public company they could by naked shorting them under the ground. That's where the uptick rule came from (hmm anyone see a pattern in SEC "solutions"). Putting the other manipulations of that time period aside, I think it's pretty obvious that naked shorting can be quite manipulative & destructive, especially in the hands of big money. And while the OSTK CEO is a whiny bitch that should spend more on that energy on his company (which is not innovative or well run), absurd levels of naked shorts, like more shares short than there are outstanding, should seem against even borderline fair market practice to anyone who is not borderline retarded.