Short selling is one of the favorite day trading strategies employed by many day traders. Many companies hate short sellers as they believe that short sellers were responsible in the fall of their stock prices. Nothing can be far from the truth. Short selling is just like any other market mechanism that provides liquidity and better price discovery. Short selling can never destroy a company if its' fundamentals are strong.

Many stock brokers now let you short stocks with just the click of a mouse. When you sell stocks from your online brokerage account, the message asks you whether you are selling your own shares or short selling. You just need to click once on short selling and the rest is taken care of by the broker. These shares are a loan to you by the broker that you will have to return at a later date!

In some cases, the brokerage firm cannot borrow the shares as so many people have sold the stock short that there are no more shares to borrow. In that case, you will have to find another stock or use another strategy.

Now, day traders are not fundamental traders. Day traders are simply interested in the daily volatility in the stock. Most even don't do any financial or fundamental analysis of the companies whose stocks they are trading. Almost all are technicians or what you call technical analysis experts. Now, shorting is one of the favorite strategies employed by day traders. A day trader may short stock on the mundane reason like its price had been going up for three days and it's time to come down!

You have to be careful about the uptick rule as stock exchanges have rules in place to help maintain an upward bias in the stock market. What this means is that you can only short a stock when the last trade was a move up. In other words, you can't short a stock that is moving down.

How much risky short selling can be? Well, in theory there is no stopping a stock price to reach the sky. So if you are wrong in your short selling decision, your loss can be catastrophic. But don't worry, short sellers also use stop loss so if the price starts to move up, your position will get closed automatically by the stop loss order.

There is something known as Short Squeeze. A short squeeze happens when the stock of the company that you have shorted has some good news that drives the stock prices high. Now if this happens, many short sellers might lose money and even get margin calls. When they get desperate to buy back the stock, its prices go even higher hurting them more.

Now many companies, brokers and investors hate short sellers and try tactics to bust them. Sometimes, they will issue good news or spread rumors of good news to create a squeeze. Other times, they can ask the stock holders collectively to tell their brokers not to loan out their shares. What this means is that short sellers have to buy back the shares and return them to the brokerage firm and close their short positions even if it does not make any sense.