Hi,
I recently got an email from my brokerage house here in Canada (Questrade). It was a quick email with a pdf that I have attached a link to that quickly outlines something they want to implement. Essentially they want to have access to shares that I own so they can lend those shares to other financial institutions and they would pay me 50% of the fees they receive for doing this.
Link.
You guys are a lot more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am, but I want to learn, so I'm asking you a few things. What exactly is happening here? Why is one financial institution borrowing shares from another institution? Who benefits and how? What downside, if any, do I have if I agree to let them do this? I don't really see any negative side effect to this if I am reading the document correctly. Sure, I lose my voting rights, if my shares are lent out, but I've never voted and can't imagine I will anyways. I'm fractions of fractions of percentage ownership of the companies I own.
Thanks!