noddaz said:In reply to eastsideTim :
The upside for the original owner is they are assuming the stock isn't going to fail, or are holding for a long term, so they get a bit of money just for having the stock.
I am still confused. Someone has 5000 shares of a marginal stock that may or may not be overvalued.
Then a hedge fund comes calling and wants you to loan it to them for a small fee. If you owned that marginal, possibly overvalued stock wouldn't that set off alarm bells? Two weeks ago I knew nothing of this. I don't know much more than that now. Somehow there must be more going on here.
Ok, how about this scenario:
"Someone" has a boatload of stock that may or may not be over-valued and is really not performing very well long term. We will call this stock GS. A guy named Mel goes to Someone and asks to borrow his stock in GS and will return it at a later date. Mel takes the stock in GS and sells it at market price at that time. Mel then puts a short sell on the GS stock to buy it back cheaper and pocket the difference before returning the devalued stock to Someone. GS stock is now pretty much worthless, the GS company may actually go out of business.
At some later date Mel splits the money that Mel made on this transaction with Someone.
But that is not what happened, is it?