Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Stock Trading Meets Paranoia

I just went in to one of my online accounts and got a freaky surprise. I want, need, to sleep in, so I ran some estimations and placed orders for morning in both accounts. The first order went fine. The second order... not so much. I got this message on my trade screen: Your order to sell FNM can not be placed as these shares are currently covering an open short call position. In order to sell FNM, you can either reduce the number of shares to sell or close out enough contracts in your open short call position.

I tried several times and got the same message.

I don't HAVE any short positions. Yet... I thought maybe I might. I went into my account to make sure I haven't been off doing crazy ass things that I don't recall doing. Maybe I sold short in my sleep, or from the twilight zone... but I didn't. I scoured my transactions and no - no shorting, no calls, no options at all. Everything was in order. I emailed the broker and only got an auto-responder. A couple hours later I went back in to try again and I did manage to finally place an order. It seems my broker denied me access to my shares because they were being used to cover short-sellers. And I thought *I* was nuts. Hmmm... Maybe the SEC should know about this. We'll see what the brokerage has to say when they get around to answering my email.

It pisses me off that I did not have access to my shares, presumably because of short selling. It pisses me off more that my first thought was of my own untrustworthy strangeness. Bastards. They can't deny me access to my own shares because others are shorting. They better have a DAMN good excuse or I'm telling.

2 comments:

  1. The whole damn world is going topsy-turvy over this financial crisis. You would think with all the attention on Wallstreet and brokerages, etc. that they would be more concerned about doing things like locking up your shares to cover someone else's short position.

    You are gutsy for being in the market right now. I don't think I have the stomach for it.

    BTW, glad you were able to move your blog. Hope you lost the irritant. Thanks for letting me know where you moved to.

    Take care,
    Tamara

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  2. I, too, thought that this crisis would put certain folks on their best behavior. I guess I was wrong.

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