Are short-sellers the bad guys?

Shorting – selling an asset you don’t own to buy it back at a lower price and pocket the difference – is vilified as cynical speculation. Is it? Simon Wilson reports.

What is short-selling?

Traditional (long') investors look for companies that are undervalued by the market and buy their stock in the hope that their share prices will rise. By contrast, short-selling means finding a security (commonly a stock) that you believe is overvalued and placing a bet that the price will fall.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.