Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) has been on a crusade against naked short selling for a couple of years (or more?). It is currently his position that naked short selling is bad. He confirms his belief in this statement on Overstock.com:
Patrick Byrne is waging a fight with Wall Street over naked short selling. He believes that, through the practice of naked shorting, Wall Street is cheating Main Street America and destroying small companies for a profit. Byrne feels that the SEC is failing to protect retail investors and small companies because it has been captured by Wall Street, and that the New York financial press is similarly co-opted. Byrne believes that the SEC’s efforts to eliminate this abusive practice are falling short, not simply for Overstock (which has itself been on the Regulation SHO Threshold list for over two years), but in a way that creates the possibility of systemic risk for our financial world.
So naked short selling is an “abusive practice”? (Notice that there are no qualifiers in the statement above. It simply says that naked shorting is bad.)