My battle with Wall Street started off as a fight regarding slop in the settlement system and how it could be used to rig the stock market (the battle later expanded into other areas, including organized crime, economic warfare, and what I felt was an insufficiently proactive regulatory environment, the latter of which, I am happy to say, is showing signs of real improvement). For a decade I have asserted that one of the sources of that slop has been the system that governs short selling. One of the sources of that slop has concerned how hedge funds locate stock to short sell. And one form of that slop originates in the "Easy to Borrow List" that prime brokerages put out each day.

Every day each prime broker (e.g., Goldman, JP Morgan) looks at the stock it has available to lend to short sellers. Assume that a prime broker has 100,000 shares of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (ticker: MSO) "in the box," which is to say, "available to lend." They put that on a list of "Easy to Borrow" stocks that it then faxes in the morning to its hedge fund clients. A hedge fund who wants to short MSO then looks at this morning's fax, and can short sell sell 100,000 shares of MSO. It can claim it has met its requirements to have a good faith belief that it will be able to locate stock to deliver in three days  based on its having seen this morning's Easy to Borrow list from its prime broker.