Quote from IBj:
Something better (perhaps) now available:
When you try to short a stock, if it is rejected due to reg-SHO or availability criteria, a message will be send to a special SLB team. If there are enough requests (we use patterning algorithms that work over many days), or the stock or requestor meet certain criteria, we will do a manual locate (i.e. search) for the title.
If we find the stock, it becomes available within a few minutes on the TWS and a message is sent to the requestors' TWS informing them the stock is available and (soon) with an indicative rate, if the cost is higher than normal. We are not sending emails because people get enough spam, why add to the clutter (we may change this if enough people prefer it, or we may use the web/trouble ticket preferences which allows sending to email, cellphone, and TWS).
We will also add a request system to the web/trouble ticket system at some point although this is somewhat redundant.