Companies Not On SEC Short Sale Ban, But Should Be

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Frankly, we think the ban on short sales is not the right way to run a free market.  But it doesn’t matter what we think.  These are the new rules, but they do not always make sense. Consider the stocks listed below that have many of the same issues as the financial companies but did not make the SEC’s list.

  • American Capital, Ltd. (NASDAQ: ACAS)
  • American Express (NYSE: AXP)
  • Capital One (NYSE: COF)
  • CIT Group (NYSE: CIT)
  • First Marblehead Corp. (NYSE: FMD)
  • General Electric (NYSE: GE)
  • General Motors (NYSE: GM)
  • HSBC Holdings PLC (NYSE: HBC)
  • thinkorswim Group Inc. (NASDAQ: SWIM)
  • VeriFone Holdings (NYSE: PAY)
  • WisdomTree Investments (OTC-WSDT)

There are many others that could be included. We refrained from going into detail for the case on each of these, but if you see the companies are tied into the financial markets it should be fairly evident why they were named. There are also some on this list which didn’t look likefinancial firms whose stocks were down because of targeted shortselling.  That’s what makes a horse race.  The SEC has referred to such companies as an  "Included Financial Firm", and you can see the full list of them herefrom the SEC.

It is possible that some of these companies have already been added to the list.  We just haven’t seen them.

Jon C. Ogg
September 19, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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