This morning I was unable to short SPY, which I use as a hedge against many of my short positions. Out of any stock, this is one that I’d expect to have the easiest time being able to short.
Can I not expect that SPY will be available to short each day? What causes something like this to be unable to be shorted?
I had the same issue. This is ridiculous. I figured out, it was able to short a few hours later.
I have the same problem with all of the current stocks. Im not able to short anything.
Apologies for the issue this morning and not being able to short. The Easy To Borrow (ETB) list which Alpaca uses to determine which symbols are shortable was incorrectly sent to Alpaca as empty. Velox, who provides this list, subsequently sent the correct file and the issue is resolved now. A root cause analysis is being done but as an immediate fix to keep this from happening in the future, Alpaca code is now looking to verify the file is not empty and will not update the ETB list if so.
Again, apologies for this.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the reply. It looks like I was unable to short SPY again this morning, so just wanted to let you know that the above change may not have fixed the problem
@EC221 There was an error loading the Easy To Borrow (ie shortable) assets this morning so, actually, no symbols appeared shortable. This has been resolved and SPY is good to go.
Why can’t $SMH be sold short today? It trades >8M shares on average per day.
@Carlos_Santana Whether a symbol can be shorted or not has little to do with how many shares are traded on a given day. A symbol is considered ‘Easy To Borrow’ (ETB) if there are enough shares available to borrow. Current shareholders who own shares can make their shares available to borrow. These shareholders are mostly institutions but some brokers allow retail traders to lend their shares too. However, if there are no shareholders willing to lend their shares then the symbol will not be ‘shortable’.
Whether there are enough shares to borrow is a matter of supply and demand. If not a lot of shareholders are willing to lend their shares then there wont be enough supply. If a lot of traders want to short then there will be too much demand. Why wouldn’t shareholders be willing to lend their shares. The most common reason is they want to sell them themself. They don’t, or won’t, have the shares to lend.
Not all brokers have access to the same ‘pool’ of shares to borrow and therefore different brokers may classify a symbol differently as shortable or not.
Thank you for your answer, understood!