We can always add the option to short shares, and offer your own shares to be lent out for shorting, and get a small payment.
If you are going to implement the shorting of shares on the exchange, please allow asset issuers enough time to raise funds in order to combat short attacks by traders looking to profit from crashing assets. Any asset without a healthy amount of buy orders would be open to an immediate plunge in value by manipulators looking to make a quick Bitcoin. I would also like to see high fees on open shorts (at least in the beginning, of something like 0.5% per 24 hours) to encourage shorts to cover their positions at some point & balance the market. In addition to that, I would like to see a limit on the short % of an asset's floating shares and healthy margin requirements.
*Being an asset issuer, my opinion is obviously biased. My goal is to protect shareholders on the GLBSE and lend my opinion to be taken into consideration in molding the exchange for everyone's benefit. Please do not attack me for this.Being an asset issuer, I look forward for the day short selling on GLBSE is possible and easy. The possibility to short is a large part of my long-term vision for this asset.
I certainly won't be adding this functionality this week. Maybe next week but no guarantee.
What I was actually thinking is users who have shares would be allowed to lend them out for shorting, and they would be able to specify the rate they want to charge for this service. People who want to short would then be able to take their pick from whats available.
What you think?
I don't like this at all. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because you have much better things to do, and because whatever you can do along these lines will not have the same flexibility as direct negotiations between lenders and borrowers.
Just make it possible to buy and sell on margin (and as great as that would be, I don't expect it to happen next week, or next month).
It would be a fee, % of the average (over 5 days) trade price of an asset.
Fees should apply only to transfers between users, not between accounts of the same user.