How to Short Sell and Cover Stocks

1. Open the account's settings

   Go to Settings and make sure the account you want is the active one — this setting is stored per account, not per person.

2. Switch on Short selling

   Under the account’s trading preferences, find Short selling and turn the switch on. It saves immediately.

   

That adds two entry types to this account’s stock trade dialog: Sell Short and Buy to Cover. Nothing else changes, and no existing trade is touched.

1. On Stock Trades, start a new trade.

2. Choose Sell Short as the entry type

   Trade Type now lists four options instead of two. Pick Sell Short.

   

3. Enter shares, price, and date as usual

   Commission pre-fills from the account’s default stock fee and stays editable.

If the trade is already finished, you don’t need two entries. With Sell Short selected, tick Also record the closing cover and a second block appears for the cover price, date, and commission. Saving writes the whole round trip at once.

The dialog previews the result as you type — for a short, that’s the opening sale price minus the cover price, times the shares, less both commissions.

1. Start a new stock trade and choose Buy to Cover as the entry type.

2. Enter the ticker, shares, and price

   You don’t need to point the cover at a position — it resolves the open short on that ticker for you.

The cover closes the position and realizes the result in the direction a short runs: profitable when you bought back below where you sold.

The import preview looks for two different signals, and handles them differently.

Ignoring the callout entirely is a valid answer — nothing is committed until you complete the import. For the wizard end to end, see the importing guides.

Switching Short selling back off blocks new short entries and nothing else. Positions you already hold stay visible, keep updating, and can still be covered — the setting gates what you can write, never what you can read. If you have open shorts at the time, the confirmation says so explicitly.

Sell Short and Buy to Cover are missing from the dialog

Short selling is off for the active account. Turn it on in Settings — see turning it on. Check which account is active first: the setting is per account, so having it on elsewhere doesn’t bring it here.

A plain Sell was refused with “Available: 0”

An ordinary Sell can only reduce shares you actually hold, so with nothing available it is refused rather than quietly opening a short. The message points you at Sell Short instead — and if the account doesn’t have short selling switched on, it tells you to enable it first.