RE: Babs23 Jan 2019 10:16
No, you borrow someone else's shares & sell them. When you close your short you buy back the shares (hopefully at a lower price) & give them back. You'll pay interest on the borrow & have to cover the difference if they go up.
On most bigger shorts, just hit the sell button on a SB.
AIM comps notoriously difficult to short. You have to get in early if at all as borrow can be limited. Most borrow comes from institutional holdings.
Not that easy of course, plenty of other factors which is why you have to be better researched and extremely patient.
You can use shorts to hedge your longs. My PF done very well in Q4 18 for example, which allowed me to get into many comps on the cheap.
Gradually adding to Indices shorts with call options as a part hedge.
I'm limited to what I can do of course, can't afford bonds for instance though there are Bond ETF's