How long do borrowed shares take to be delivered when short selling stocks?
Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at
1:39 am
Let’s say that I want to short XYZ stock. I place an order with my broker, who will some time in the future borrow shares of XYZ stock, sell them, and credit the proceeds to my margin account (if all goes well).
How long does that process generally take, assuming XYZ isn’t on the broker’s hard-to-borrow list? In other words, how long, approximately, from the moment I place the order to the moment I can buy to cover?
Filed under: Natural Gas Futures
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They either have them in inventory or not it takes a few minutes if the shares are scarce and you’re a valuable enough customer to the broker to have to call on a landline to headquarters to drum up some shares but usually not. Usually just a computer transaction with things like QQQ etc and can directly through your trading software.