A former equity trader who made his fortune on Wall Street has created a hedge fund to attack The Coca-Cola Company.
American Max Keiser, founder of Karmabanque, has created a boycott-based financial assault on the American multinational. The hedge fund will attempt to “short” the share price of The Coca-Cola Company.
“Shorting” works in the following way:
You phone your broker. The broker will effectively lend you the stock of a company for a given period of time, say six months. You will be required to return the amount of stock you have been lent on that day. Let us say that you borrow 100 shares at a value of $100. Then you immediately sell the stock for its current value, which is $100. You then hope that the value falls—that is your bet, or “short position”.
So when the six-month period is up, your broker wants his stock back (your broker takes a commission whatever happens). If the value of the stock has fallen to $50, then you buy 100 shares at $50 and give them back to the broker. Your broker has back his 100 shares but you have made $50 profit as you sold the original stock for $100 and have only had to give back shares worth $50. Of course, if the stock goes up in value instead of falling, you will lose. Shorting is a very risky financial transaction.
“But our fund is different,” Keiser says. “We will create a fund based on the amount of people who come and register with us at www.karmabanque.com to boycott the product. He added: “The more people join our boycott, the more money will be pumped into the fund. The more people join the boycott, the bigger the signal becomes to the financial community to sell their shares.”
The trader hopes that boycotts will be a way that communities around the world can show their anger at US foreign policy.?