Capitalism only optimises with freely available information. As long as I know you don't have a share, and the market as a whole knows you don't have a share, t

Capitalism only optimises with freely available information. As long as I know you don't have a share, and the market as a whole knows you don't have a share, then yes, it's not fraud. The fraud is you decide (with your cabal) to appear to have shares, you don't announce to the market "I'm selling 5% of STONKS but I don't own any STONKS [yet]". When I buy from you there's no shares that I bought. It's not fraudulent if you don't have the coffee, as long as you make public that you don't, "I do not own any coffee, but will sell you a delivery of coffee for August". Now, if you're selling share in ownership of a company, IMO it's right to disallow - by law - representations of ownership of companies that are not backed by numbered shares. It's not coffee, you can only own shares in the company itself, you can't get those shares from other origins it's not a commodity. You make a post-harvest offer to sell me coffee from a particular plantation, then you arrange for the media to report that plantation's coffee is really inferior, maybe not even drinkable - something you had arranged in advance, of course. Tell me, why is this good for society? Now, you advertise, with your friends, lots of coffee available at low prices (after all the media said it's inferior coffee), only thing is you're offering more coffee for sale at low prices than there is coffee from that plantation ... that's driving the price down, there being lots of coffee noone wants ... only it's a lie, a trick, a fraud, just so you can manipulate the price. And now, oh look that plantation has gone out of business and you managed to buy them coffee I ordered for essentially nothing. Wow, you added so much value to the World by destroying the livelihood of that coffee plantation's workers.