If you want to indirectly short a hard to borrow stock, you can just short an ETF containing it. You then buy stakes in all the other underlying securities in this ETF.
This makes you net short only the one stock you did not buy a stake in.
This is also the explaination for ETFs having a short interest of sometimes 100+% (e.g. $XRT)
You can rinse and repeat this process to short as long as you want.
At some points the overall held shares of these ETFs will exceed the outstanding, which should be impossible.
Fun fact:
If a trading firm would use this practise, their books would look something like this:
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh