I know one can set a global shorting_enabled already, but I would like the ability to enable/disable shorting for any specific sell order. This would protect against unintentional shorting when client side tracking of positions gets out of with sync server side tracking/execution of orders. Since shorting is qualitatively different from selling an existing position, extra protection through a parameter when posting an order would be useful.
Interesting idea. Would maybe a user defined list of shortable or not-shortable stocks work for this? Maybe even extend that to tradable or not-tradable at the user level?
I think it may not be flexible enough. For example a user might want to be able to short ABC in principle but with the current sell order only want to exit a long position. Got the idea from other APIs like TDA which explicitly specify in the order whether it’s exiting a long position or opening a short position.