How do I lend /borrow stock?

Hi Sidney,

Obviously I have no idea of your portfolio size but I’m afraid your considering muscling in on the terrain of the institutions, its expensive & hard:

• Some institutions pick up a few percent to lend stock out to option traders, “shorters”, hedge fund managers etc but this would be in the 100,000’s of shares at a time i.e. big $$’s for say BHP.
• The CFD provider will not offer the stock to short because they can’t get ‘borrow’. If an institution cannot get borrow on a stock, an individual investor will find it very difficult.

Moving on to your other 2 questions:

• the numerous “small trades” are computer generated actions by systems that are generally attempting to match VWOP price i.e. the volume weighted average price of the day. We generally use these sorts of orders when trading in our portfolio’s, which means we step as lightly as we can around the market.
• If its an investment bank / broker putting out these notices, it would be on behalf of underlying clients, so they may have client who is substantial upweighting that stocks, and another down weighting for example.