Audio Alert When Shortable

Since I use Interactive Brokers, the main method of determining if a stock is shortable has been looking at a colored column. Bright green means there are at least 1000 shares available to short, dark green means you can sell short but there are currently no shares available to do so. Lastly, red means the security is unavailable to short.

 

The frustrating part is that the stocks with really great risk/reward for shorting quickly have their borrows eaten up by the most attentive traders. Since locates can often become available intraday, you pretty much have to have your eyes on the column at all times if you want those shares. Unless you can devote the screen real estate to have the column visible throughout the day, you'll likely miss some good opportunities.

Luckily there are some other options. The easiest is to just set a GTC order below the best bid so that when shares do become available, you'll get executed. At least theoretically. In practice, that doesn't always work. Day orders actually seem to have priority so you might just use a GTC order to remind yourself to set a day order below the bid every morning. Just be prepared to have both orders execute if lots of shares become available and your GTC order is in range of the stock price.

Even better though, are audio alerts when the stock becomes shortable. That way you don't even have to be at your computer to quickly learn of new borrows on a stock you're watching. I only figured out how to do this yesterday and I'm curious how many other people have figured it out. For now though I'm keeping it to myself because it just seems like too valuable of an edge to give out for free.