Stock shorting or going short is a high risk, high reward strategy of playing the Stock Market. To short a stock means to sell the stock first, in the hope that the stock price will fall, so we can buy the stock back (closing the short position) at a lower price. So sell first buy later - this would be profitable if the price go down. On the other hand if the price go up, there is no limit of how high it can go so the loss level in this strategy is unlimited.
If there are big amount of shorts on a particular stock, it may actually influence the price to go down. Then when the price is down, the short-sellers (people who short the stocks) will come back to buy the shares at a lower price - they win. The stock itself has gone down, not for business performance reason, but for reasons of such influence.
So it may be good to know which stocks are heavily shorted, for those of us ordinary investors who simply want to do the simple thing by buying shares. It so happens that the Australian Securities and Investment Commision (
ASIC) collects and publishes this data and is available freely at:
https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/markets/short-selling/short-position-reports-table/
The site also keep the historical shorted stocks records for a number of years. Available in PDF or CSV formats.
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