危机中的做空者：金融市场的恶魔还是守护者？ | 经济学人财经
1
思维导图作者：
2
Finance and economics | Buttonwood
财经板块 | 梧桐树专栏
英文部分选自经济学人20231202期财经板块
Finance and economics | Buttonwood
财经板块 | 梧桐树专栏
Short-sellers are endangered. That is bad news for markets
卖空者面临危险。这对市场而言是个不利的消息。
Nobody likes shorts, but they provide an invaluable service
没有人喜欢空头，但他们确有非凡作用
注释：
short-selling：卖空，做空。可以简单理解，常规的市场交易是低买高卖，先买后卖。做空反之，高卖低买，因其对股价看跌，“借”股票先高价卖出，之后在股价跌的时候低价买入，由此还上股票，从而获得收益。
拓展材料：
【「干货」听说过《大空头》吧？那么一起来看看卖空Short Selling是如何运作的吧？||YouTube搬运||The Plain Bagel||外挂中英字幕】
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14k4y1y7ti/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=aff7542a3a0747790e5abe008054f224
If you want to be liked, don’t be a short-seller. Some other investors might defend you, at least in the abstract, as an important part of a healthy and efficient market. But to most you are—at best—a ghoul who profits from the misfortune of others. At worst, you are a corporate raider who bets that honest firms will go bust and then spreads lies about them until they do. Even your defenders will melt away if you pick the wrong target (shares they own) or the wrong moment (a crash in which many are losing money but you are making it).
若想招人喜欢，就不要当空头。一些投资者也许会为你辩护；毕竟，理论上，做空操作是健康而高效市场的重要组成部分。但对大多数人而言，往好了说，你是从他人不幸中获利的食尸鬼；往坏了说，你是企业催命人，押注于诚信经营的公司会破产并不断散播谣言，直到它们真的倒闭。即便是支持你的投资人，若你选择了错误的目标（做空他们持股的公司）或错误的时机（市场崩盘，多数人亏损而你盈利），也会同你渐行渐远。
注释：
1.Ghoul：a legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses 食尸鬼
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghoul
2.Raider：a fast lightly armed ship operating against merchant shipping 袭击者；侵入者
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/raider
Since the authorities are often among these fair-weather friends, the list of historical short-selling bans is long. It features 17th-century Dutch regulators, 18th-century British ones and Napoleon Bonaparte. The latest addition, issued on November 6th, came from South Korea’s Financial Services Commission. It has caught the zeitgeist well, and not just among the army of local retail investors who blame shorts for a soggy domestic stockmarket. Wall Street’s “meme stock” craze also cast amateur traders as the heroic underdogs, pitted against villainous short-selling professionals.
由于当局往往见风使舵，因此历史上卖空禁令屡见不鲜，尤以17世纪荷兰和18世纪英国的监管机构，以及拿破仑·波拿巴为典型。如今最新的禁令出自韩国金融服务委员会（Financial Services Commission），发布于11月6日。这一禁令不仅受到了众多韩国散户的欢迎（散户们将韩国股市的低迷归咎于空头），也很好地抓住了时代的主旋律。华尔街的“迷因股”（Meme Stock）热潮也把做空机构和散户对立起来，前者成了邪恶巨人歌利亚，后者成了手拿投石索的大卫。
注释：
1.fair-weather friends：loyal only during a time of success 不能共患难的朋友
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair-weather
2.Meme stock：迷因股
Source: stock that experiences a temporary sudden surge in popularity and price due to a coordinated effort (such as a viral social media campaign) by small investors
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme%20stock
延申阅读：
1.《韩国全面禁止卖空推高韩国和亚太股市，长期影响有多大？》
Source: https://m.yicai.com/news/101897254.html
2.《Meme Stock 是什么股票？具体是怎么发生的？》
Source: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/473297097
3.《散户炒作？机构做空？你必须知道的Meme Stock！》
Source: https://www.ukpanda.net/investment/investment-financial-market/meme-stock.html
Meanwhile, one of America’s best-known shorts, Jim Chanos, wrote to his investors on November 17th to announce the closure of his main hedge funds. “Our assets under management just fell to the point where it was no longer economic to run them,” he explains, defining that point as “a few hundred million”. At its peak in 2008, a few years after predicting the downfall of Enron, an energy company, his firm was managing “between $6bn and $7bn”. Since being set up in 1985 its short bets have returned profits of nearly $5bn to its investors.
与此同时，美国最知名的空头之一吉姆·查诺斯（Jim Chanos）于11月17日致信投资者，宣布将关闭其麾下主要对冲基金。他解释称：“我们管理的资产总额已降至临界点，再运营下去就是赔本赚吆喝了。”在他看来，几亿美元已经到了无利可图的临界点。在2008年的巅峰时期，即成功预测能源公司安然（Enron）倒闭几年后，他的公司管理着“60-70亿美元”的资产。自1985年成立以来，其空头押注已为投资者带来了近50亿美元的利润。
延申阅读：
1.《世界最大能源企业的做空者——吉姆查诺斯Jim Chanos》
Source: https://m.gelonghui.com/p/242054
2.《大空头退场！查诺斯将关闭麾下对冲基金》
Source: https://ifnews.com/news.html?aid=554627&cid=37
The shorts who remain in the game, then, face two threats. The first is an old one: that regulators, egged on by those who view short-selling as immoral, will clamp down on their business model. The second, more insidious, threat is that investors have lost patience with that business model and no longer want to put their money into it. Should short-sellers fall prey to either danger, financial markets will be worse at allocating capital, and those who invest in them will be worse off.
因此，尚在局中的空头们面临着两重威胁。第一重是老生常谈了：认定做空不道德的声音会促使监管者严厉打压做空。第二重更隐蔽却威胁更大，即投资者对这一商业模式失去耐心，不再注入资金。空头们无论踩了哪个坑，金融市场配置资本的能力都会受到影响，其间的投资者也免不了受到牵连。
注释：
1.egg on: to urge or encourage (someone) to do something that is usually foolish or dangerous
怂恿；鼓动（做多为愚蠢或危险的事）
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/egg%20on
2.fall prey to: : to be harmed or affected in a bad way by (someone or something)成为...的牺牲品；深受..之害
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fall%20prey%20to
Start with the charge that betting on asset prices falling is immoral. This view holds that short-sellers drive down prices, hurting other investors’ returns and making it harder for companies (or even governments) to raise capital. Most obviously, it ignores the fact that the shorts’ biggest targets tend to be those, like Enron, that have themselves defrauded investors. Short-sellers are the only people with a strong financial incentive to uncover such frauds and bring them to light, saving investors from even greater losses in the long run. The same is true of firms that are simply overvalued. Had shorts managed to puncture the dotcom bubble earlier, or the more recent ones in spacs and meme stocks, fewer investors would have bought in at the top and lost their shirts.
许多人指责押宝资产价格下跌的行为有失道义，不妨从这里说起。持有这一观点的人认为，做空拉低了股价，导致其他投资者的回报下降，使得企业（甚至政府）更难融资。可显而易见的是，他们忽略了这样一个事实——被空头们瞄得最死的往往是安然这样自身存在金融欺诈行为的公司。只有空头才有足够强的经济动机去探究并揭露此类金融欺诈，因此从长远来看，他们能帮助投资者规避更大的损失。对于估值虚高的公司而言，这一点同样适用。但凡空头们能早些戳破当年的互联网泡沫，或是近来的空壳公司和“迷因股”，很多投资者或许就不会高位接盘，最后输光底裤。
注释：
1.spacs：SPAC（Special Purpose Acquisition Company）指特殊目的并购公司，又称“空白支票公司”，实际上是一家空壳公司。
Source: http://sg.mofcom.gov.cn/article/dtxx/202104/20210403052850.shtml
2.lose one's shirts: to lose a lot of money because of a bad bet or investment输得精光
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lose%20one's%20shirt
延申阅读：
《财总和审计师同时辞职，美股再现“安然造假案”？》
Source: https://cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/1030341137/3d69c211019014sxv?autocallup=no&isfromsina=no
Meanwhile, there is scant evidence that short-selling depresses prices. A study of six European countries that temporarily banned short-selling during the crash of March 2020, by Wolfgang Bessler and Marco Vendrasco of the University of Hamburg, found that these bans failed to stabilise stockmarkets. Instead, they reduced liquidity, increasing the gap between “buy” and “sell” prices and thereby making transactions more costly. Moreover, the shares of smaller firms—often painted as victims of bigshot shorts—suffered more from a deterioration in market quality.
同时，指控做空拉低股价的说法也缺乏有力证据。汉堡大学（University of Hamburg）的沃尔夫冈·贝斯勒 （Wolfgang Bessler）和马尔科·文德拉斯科（Marco Vendrasco）研究了2020年3月股市崩盘期间发出卖空禁令的六个欧洲国家。研究结果表明，卖空禁令并没有起到稳定股市的作用；相反，禁令减少了流动性，增加了“买入”和“卖出”之间的价格差，导致交易成本上升。小公司通常以大空头受害者的影响出现；然而，其股价受市场质量下降的负面影响更大。
What short-sellers can do, if they head off the second threat and convince their investors to stick with them, is alert the rest of the market to assets they believe to be overvalued. They are often successful in this endeavour: take Adani Enterprises, a vast Indian conglomerate that was loudly shorted by Hindenburg Research in January, and whose share price is down 39% since the start of the year. Such arguments might be self-interested, but so are those of any fund manager talking up their book.
要化解第二重威胁，说服投资者继续将资金托付于自己，空头们可以提醒市场注意他们认定估值虚高的资产。在这方面，空头们一直做得不错。以阿达尼公司（Adani Enterprises）为例，做空机构兴登堡研究公司（Hindenburg Research）曾在今年一月高调做空这家印度巨头，导致年初以来其股价下跌了39%。这般说辞可能稍显利己美化，但把自家投资方案吹得天花乱坠的基金经理们又何尝不是如此？
延申阅读：
《美知名做空机构枪口对准“印度雄心”，“亚洲首富”跌下宝座》
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1756703952534063112&wfr=spider&for=pc
The difference is that the longs are backed by investment banks, public-relations advisers and the companies themselves, all with a clear interest in selling optimism and hype. Markets work better, and capital is allocated more efficiently, when there are also killjoys willing to take the opposing side. And with stockmarkets, especially America’s, close to their all-time highs, the insurance against a crash that short-selling funds provide may be particularly valuable to investors. After all, notes Mr Chanos, the fact that it is so out of fashion means it is cheaper than ever.
区别在于，多头拥有投资银行、公关顾问和公司本身的支持，他们显然都更愿意散播乐观情绪、助长炒作投机。但有人愿意“唱反调”、“泼冷水”时，市场会运作得更好，资本配置会更有效。随着股市，尤其是美国股市接近历史高点，对投资者而言，做空基金所能提供的崩盘早期预警显得尤为可贵。毕竟，吉姆•查诺斯就说过，过时的东西价格最低。
翻译组：
Martina，女，爱电影爱生活，爱金融经济
Snowy，厨艺初级的新闻民工，啥都学点的体育爱好者
校对组：
Ithil，原神，启动
Hannah，做个废柴，保持愉快
Eva，寻路中，偶尔怀念，时常向前
3
感想
本周感想：
Cleo Yue，男，学习不停，思考不止，努力成为审慎却乐观的深入思考者
本文讨论了做空策略对于资本市场发展的优缺点，且在字里行间稍有提倡空头策略的态度。 对于我来说，我认为做空策略与做多策略同样重要，因为这两种策略都是市场对当下行情进行分析后的主观反映，一个是利用价格下行赚钱，另一个则是低买高卖。每一类不同的观点反映在交易策略上都可以更好的塑造一个更加市场化且高效的市场环境。
空头往往是押注资产短期内价值被高估，有时也可以通过教育市场从而影响标的价格，这里的资产并不只是股票，债券也同样适用，利用回购也可以达到类似借券的目的。债券的价格走势往往来自于利率与宏观经济以及评级，这些因素很少可以受到少数空头基金经理的影响从而大幅度变动，那么也就只有股票的空头仓位相对来说更依托于基金经理对市场的教育。如果优秀的基金经理可以发现标的的财务造假，信息粉饰从而向市场抒发其观点和证据，并且可以让部分投资人信服，那这就是一次漂亮的做空。既体现了市场的高效，有帮助市场提高了信息质量。
但在此背后，更需要道德的支持。首先做空机构要言之有理，不能随便传播谣言，其次就是市场参与者也一定要独立思考，沉着冷静。这样来看，才算是有效的市场行为。如果空头机构随便说两句，大众也根本听不懂在讲什么就宁可信其有，这样的市场往往很快就会失去可信度，使得资产的价格体现的不公允。对于我来说，空头一定是可以帮助市场反应资产价格的重要手段，但同样塑造自由市场是有成本的，那就是市场中的每一个参与者都要遵守道德，合法合规。
4
愿景
微信扫码关注该文公众号作者