Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Regulators Spring Into Action Against Naked Short Sellers. Or not. December 7th, 2008 by Patrick Byrne

As is explained in numerous pieces in DeepCapture, there are many cracks in the settlement system, one of them being the DTCC’s Continuous Net Settlement system, or CNS. I am highly confident that the federales (at least, the SEC) are not permitted to explore the other cracks, that the failures to deliver that they see within the CNS are thus but a small fraction of all that exist, and that, therefore, trying to gauge the depth of the naked short selling problem from the level of FTD’s in the CNS is like trying to guess the condition of an automobile from the level of water in its radiator.

But it’s a start. Given that the CNS system is the one place the SEC can look, and might be able to do something about, it is instructive to see how well they are cleaning up unsettled trades there. Towards that end, DeepCapture has analyzed the data that the SEC released last week. These graphs show their fine progress in that regard.

Full Story www.deepcapture.com/category/data/

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