I bought the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s yesterday. They’re kept behind the counter at Chapters/Indigo. American price is carefully crossed out in ink and Canadian prices are written in by hand. I thought it was funny.

Barron’s American price is $5, I paid CAD $7.08, though at the $1.05-1.07 exchange rate it should have been $5.35 at most. If you think it must be the cost of transportation, well, we’re really not that far from the state of New York (just a 2-hour drive), so this is just another example of blatant rip-off that we’re so used to here, in Canada.

Anyway, I wanted to highlight a couple of paragraphs, with some social commentary.

Barron’s

Emphasis mine

…Cox, in taking out after the shorts – whom nobody loves except their immediate families (and we’re not even sure about them) – was more….

This was intended as a witty comment, I get it, but – wow! I’m only now starting to notice how shorts are hated by so many people.

I’m finding out that all the investors I know (in real life, not virtually) have no idea how to short. They’ve heard about it, and they think it’s something shady. Here I have to step back and realize that not everyone is into investing/trading, they just want to make money and the easiest way – as they’ve been taught – is to invest for the long-term, preferrably with the help of an advisor, so why would they know about shorting?

Wall Street Journal

Emphasis original

Short sales of Morgan Stanley rose to 2.9% of market value of the company Sept. 16, up from 2% at the beginning of September, though it was as high as 7% in July, according to Data Explorers Inc., a research firm. Short sales of Merrill Lynch & Co. rose as high as 3.8% of the broker’s market value last week, from under 2% in early September, though it topped 9% in July.

Short selling hasn’t really been soaring, and share prices were going down either because of investors’ loss of confidence or naked short selling (possibly), or both. Not due to the legitimate short selling that’s been banned.