What does "short selling" and "long selling" mean in the stock market?

Answer 1

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Most people think about trading stocks in the "long" fashion. This is when you buy a stock, hold on to it for a period of time, then later sell it (hoping that the price is higher than when you bought it.) It's the way most individual investors trade stocks and it's pretty easy to understand.

Short trading is a little trickier. Shorting a stock is basically borrowing shares of a stock and promising to give them back later. After you borrow the stock you sell it. This is called "short selling". Then eventually you must pay the shares back to wherever you borrowed them from. You have to buy them back, hoping that the stock is cheaper now than when you sold it. This is called "buying to cover".

"short selling" = selling a stock you don't own and you have to buy it back later
"long selling" = selling a stock after buying it yourself

Answer 2

Short selling is selling shares that you don't own in the belief that the price is going to fall. To fulfil your contract you hope to buy the shares for less than you sold them thus making a profit. Hedge funds do this all the time. Long selling is the other way round but not very common

Answer 3

"buying or selling long" is just the simple way all business is done. U buy something (stocks, in this example) and then sell it later. The goal being to buy it for a lower price than u sell it for.

"Selling short" is one of those weird things that only a program set up to confuse everyone outside it, could come up with.
U "sell" the stock at a certain price, but u have never bought it,, actually. It has to have been on an "upward tic" prior to ur selling it short (it has to have an upward price movement, the last reporting, prior to u "selling it short". it cannot be already falling in price, before u sell it short.)
Then, at a latter date, u "buy it back". But since u already sold it, u don't actually own it when u buy it back.
If the price dropped, after u sold it short, and u bought it back while it was still low, then u make money.
If the price does not drop, after u sold it short, or if u did not sell it while it was lower, then u lose money.
It is not supposed to make since, it is supposed to keep common people from understanding trading, lol.

Answer 4

Both systems are based on the fact that there is an interval of time between buying or selling shares and their delivery.

When you sell short, you sell first and buy the shares later, hopefully at a lower price.

When you sell long you buy the shares first and sell later hopefully at a higher price.