Quote from gamalruach:
danke: The concept of shorting freezes many peoples' minds for some reason.
I am your broker. You come to me to make a trade. The instrument you want to trade just shot up 100 points and you feel certain the move is groundless and it will fall back quickly.
You borrow the shares/units from me by selling them into the market (since you never owned them you must borrow them from me first then you can sell them).
Sure enough as soon as you open the sell trade the price tumbles 90 points down. All that is your profit.
You then "cover" that is, buy back the shares/units you sold then return them to me (since you borrowed them from me).
You keep the profit less either my commission or spread.
In stocks you can only short on an uptick. Not so in forex.
Also, in stocks new rules make it to where you need a minimum amount of money in your account ($25K?) to actively short stocks. Again, not so with fx.
Cheers!
Sam