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All short positions SHOULD BE disclosed. Any stock lending should be subject to daily reports. Keeping the data hidden hurts retail investors, as the price is being affected by things they are unable to see.
My concern with shorting a stock is the impact that action has on the company. By shorting 100% of a company's stock (or more!), the stock may drop to a low enough price that the company can't survive regardless of the underlying value. I would suggest a cap on the percentage of a company's outstanding shares that can be shorted, say 60%. This would allow the investor the ability to short while not driving the company out of business by doing so.
It will never be a fair playing field if shorts are not disclosed and we will look like frauds to the entire world. Naked short sellers deserve prison.
Of particular interest is the section on Synthetic Short Positions. It seems that approved participants can use synthetics to improve market liquidity, but it also creates a problem of diluting the stock when the shorts fail to deliver. Would position reporting also help to track FTD's better and implement some regulation to have those failures sufficiently resolved before more synthetics are allowed to be created? I understand this could squeeze the shorts a bit, but it seems to make sense in terms of correctly managing scalability.
FINRA warns member firms of an ongoing phishing campaign that involves fraudulent emails (see sample in Appendix) purporting to be from FINRA and using the domain name “@gateway-finra.org.” The email asks the recipient to click a link to “view request” and provide information to “complete” that request, noting that “late submission may attract penalties.”
FINRA recommends that anyone who clicked on any link or image in the email immediately notify the appropriate individuals in their firm of the incident.
Short selling, when done ethically for the right reasons, provides an important market balance. However, it is obvious given events of the last several months that some entities are engaged in naked short selling and market manipulation. Because of the current lack of oversight, lack of detailed reporting, and the other obvious problems those entities are causing massive chaos. This kind of predatory stock dilution cannot be allowed.
While more reporting around Short Interest Positions is to be encouraged and applauded, unless the market "plumbing" that allows failures-to-deliver to continue in perpetuity is also addressed, these changes will not solve the underlying problem. Address short interest reporting AND the failures-to-deliver problem if you really want to fix this issue.
Please don't delay this rule - any formatting is okay.