SentimentRules wrote:"Discussion of potential shares, and of shares which have been selected in the past, is acceptable on the HYP Practical Board"
Rules are not suggesting ... only discuss if bullish and pro HYP
You seem to be failing to find the most relevant bit:
"A long term buy and hold (LTBH) of these shares is envisaged."
Shorting is about as far from LTBH as one can get, and while the board doesn't go to the "buy and hold forever" extreme of LTBH, it doesn't allow anywhere remotely close to that much deviation from it.
But as regards being "pro HYP" or "anti HYP",
neither of them is encouraged. "Anti HYP" comments are discouraged more strongly, I believe because they're more likely to provoke off-topic arguments and people here are therefore more likely to report "anti HYP" posts. But basically, this is not supposed to be the board for those who want to debate the merits or otherwise of HYP strategies - those debates should instead go to the High Yield Shares & Strategies board, or the Investment Strategies board for even less of a focus on high yield. This board is supposed to be for those who have already decided about those merits, have come to the decision that they want to run a HYP and now want to get on with the practical business of actually running it - decisions about which shares to buy, whether to sell a share (with at least a fairly strong bias against doing so, otherwise the supposed HYP strategy won't actually be LTBH in practice), how to deal with a corporate action, etc. Reporting on how one's HYP has turned out in practice is also accepted (provided not done too often - I'd recommend no more than when needed as background for a practical decision one is asking about, plus at most an annual report on its progress), and comments about being satisfied or dissatisfied with its performance are fine. But not advocacy either for or against owning a HYP - i.e. actively trying to persuade others to own one or not own one rather than just letting them see your satisfaction / dissatisfaction and leaving them to decide for themsel
And there's a good reason for that: to have a proper debate about something, it needs to be on a level playing field that
all sides of the debate can use equally. If someone wants to argue that HYP strategies are no good and people should be using strategy X instead, they should be able to describe strategy X without being cut short by a moderator - and if they want to argue that HYP strategies are no good without suggesting any alternative, they should not have an "I could, but I won't because it's off-topic" cop-out when challenged to suggest something better.
I.e. this board is unsuitable for "are HYP strategies good or not?" debates for basically the same reason that if one wants to have a good political debate about the relative merits of the different parties' policies, one should not try to start it in a meeting of
any of those parties: you need somewhere where
all of the arguments both for and against all of those policies can be gone into properly without being cut off for being disruptive...
Gengulphus