Remark Holdings (MARK) was the stock du jour, doing 167,000 trades and $245MM in volume. It’s a Reg SHO Threshold List member so the brookie had no borrow, but oddly IB had a quarter million shares available to short so I went there to trade it. I had an OK average (2.80921) but it was holding the hourly support like a champ, and I thought, geez, I’m going to get jammed out of this and, worst nightmare, that will be just the moment IB has no borrow and I won’t be able to re-short it to “get it back.” And you know what happened next: I got jammed out of it, (though IB didn’t run out of borrow, that will happen tomorrow). I had a 2.88126 ave getting out, which ain’t bad, but multiplied by a gazillion shares (you don’t wanna know), it was a pretty big loss. Maybe I’ll be able to get it back tomorrow, assuming IB still has a borrow.

With the bookie I traded OBLN (very thin with 23,700 trades and $1.5MM in volume) and MTC (61,300 trades and $34.6MM in volume) … they both gave me good spots and faded all day into the close (no partial profits taken, Dave Mabe!). Big gains, tremendous gains as Dear Leader might say. I’ll tell you what else was tremendous: the borrow fees. MTC was a 25 !?! cent borrow ($2500 per 10,000) and later dropped to 10.6 cents (where I borrowed more). It’s a $3 stock. Imagine being a losing trader AND paying fees like that. Yeah, tough game. OBLN was a 1.84 cent borrow ($184 per 10,000) … that’s more like it, but still. I should note that I paid more in commissions at IB than I did for all my borrows at the brookie. See how they get you? One way or another.