Adam should interview the managing directors of those companies in the energy and materials sectors such as Beach Petroleum, Mincor Resources, Avoca Resources and others, who have been targeted by short sellers.

These are companies who raise venture capital on the basis of the fundamentals of their business enterprise and in turn on the basis of their share price. For them and those who had supplied their venture capital, short selling is theft of share price growth - the return and reward for early high risk-taking that rightly belongs to shareholders.

It is a practice which not only diminishes the investments of all shareholders, but far worse, it will eventually disadvantage the raising of venture capital and ultimately the Australian economy.

This practice not only needs to be banned indefinitely, but those who have employed it in the past need to be exposed by the Australian Securities Exchange. And those superannuation funds who loaned shares to legalise the practice of covered short selling are accomplices in that theft. They too need to be exposed for their duplicity and greed.

AND If the BIG problem in the market in the last 20 years has been over-valuing, bubble-pricing (created largely by facilitation of nano-second rationality) then, duh, wouldn’t a share correction downwards be exactly a) confirmation of the real culprits; b) reflect pricing that has at least the possibility of being more closely linked to assessments of actual company performance and prospects; c) a bloody good thing?

I’m a long-term share-holder. I don’t want to ‘earn’ money off gossip and funny money games, I reckon its a pathetic con, among others. The worst (or perhaps the best) thing about it to me, is that it erodes credibility in the whole system of work and financial reward. I mean historically the capitalist lobby has had a tough time getting profit to be, by and large, accepted as a legitimate way to ‘earn’ money. But, even putting aside any of its market screw-up effects, the justifications underpinning that consent are totally shot through by the reward system in the deregulated short-selling financial sector. This is only compounded by the stitched-up, inbred CEO/Director market. Both defy any meaningful sense of ‘earning’ money. Worse, its being copied elsewhere.