Blog Posts Tagged with Etfs

New ETF Holdings Functionality

I spend an inordinate amount of time updating & cleaning up data that comes into SwingTradeBot. A good portion of that is removing acquired & delisted stocks and filling in missing data for newly listed stocks & ETFs. So I see a ton of ETFs being added to the market every month.

During the pandemic some of the names and/or tickers of these new ETFs piqued my interest -- such as GERM & Work From Home ETF (WFH). So I started wishing I could see their holdings right on SwingTradeBot. Luckily one of my data providers has ETFs components as part of their service. So I wrote some code to start ingesting that data and displaying it on the site.

Thoughts on NPR Planet Money's Short Selling Episode

Those who used to read my old blog know that I have no problem at all with short selling. See some of my old posts like 'The (Very) Basics of Short Selling', 'Short Selling *is* American' and 'Pick Your Spots When Selling Short'. So in that light,when I saw that NPR's Planet Money podcast did two episodes about short selling I was very interested in seeing how they'd handle the subject. The second of those episodes was the story of the first short sale ever, which was back in the days of The Dutch East India Company:

There have been short sellers throughout history. Today, the story of a man who was the very first short seller. The first person to bet that a stock will go down. It doesn't go well for him.

That was a very interesting story but I want to focus on the first of the recent episodes, which was titled "We're Short America". That episode was their version of 'Short Selling 101'. They explained how shorting worked and actually took a small sum of money and shorted the S&P 500. But they left out some things that I think are very important to fully explaining the risks of shorting.