Shorting is an interesting dilemma because it seems gross but it is also very useful to avoid stocks artifically ballooning to outrageous prices. It puts pressure on stock prices to go down to counteract investor pressure for stocks to go up.
THAT BEING SAID one of the things I've read is that companies don't have to disclose their shorts like they do with their long calls which seems very unethical. You should not be able to make hidden positions because then you run into situations where a hedge fund shorts a sector, like hotels, and then goes on the talk show circuit preaching doom & gloom to try and crash that market without anyone realizing they have a financial interest in it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/2...ncluding-hilton.html
quote:
Bill Ackman warned ‘hell is coming’ because of virus: He then pocketed $2B in bets against markets
The other thing that is going to be interesting is when it comes out who put pressure on Robinhood and other trading platforms to remove GME from active trades. Someone got Robinhood to operate directly against their own investors best interests to help give hedge funds a chance to run the market down so they can reposition themselves in less risky positions.
If etrade platforms hadn't delisted then when they ran the market down, retailers would have snatched up all the discounted stocks but because individual investors were frozen and left scrambling to find a platform that they could still buy through, that gave hedge funders basically time to play around with the market without the peasants ruining their game.