On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 05:33:16PM -0500, David J Patrick wrote:

That begs the question; are there any investment wizards in the group who know how to "short" a stock and, thus" reap the reward for predicting SCOs (and soon enough M$s) swan dive ?

Shorting a stock is trivially easy. Just go to your friendly online broker website, and sell some. [Note: not all stocks are allowed to be shorted, but I don't think SCOX is one of them.] Shorting is nothing more than owning a negative number of shares of a stock. [Technically, owing a number of shares of a stock to some unspecified person, but you don't care who that person is.] When you sell 100 shares of SCOX at $15, you end up with $1500 and -100 shares of SCOX. If SCOX drops to $5, you buy back 100 shares of it for $500, and you've made a $1000 profit (and now have 0 shares of SCOX). But if instead, unbeknownst to everyone, SCOX has been using the lawsuit as a smokescreen to hide its super-secret research efforts into real-time widget operating systems, and announces the Best Thing Ever (TM), its stock price may jump to $50, and if you hold -100 of them, you'll now have to pay $5000 to close out your position, and you're in the hole big time. - Ian -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml