This comment letter to the SEC is an absolute must read. It clearly, concisely, and logically lays out how exactly all the naked short selling takes place, at all the various levels of the system.
It also explains why a failure to receive is a different animal than a failure to deliver. Fascinating.
Which gives additional clarity to the SIA's spreadsheet, which shows $82 billion for NYSE member firms in failure to delivers, and receives.
Who knows how many fails are concealed from view by repo agreements? You know, where you don't call it a fail because you have a repo agreement to buy the shares back at some future date? That is a mechanism to sell many millions of shares naked with absolutely no failures appearing in the system. While many of the repos are likely bonds, it is unknown how many are FTDs being masked. Nobody knows. And if you look at the spreadsheet, the number of dollars involved is trillions.
Read this letter. You start to really understand why no sane person would have a dime in the market.