Short selling is just like long buying. There's no delay for your order to arrive on the market during regular market hours, however, as you say, you need to wait for some other investor to fill your order by buying in at the price you specified, or higher.
As for being paid, you're paid just as if you were buying stock instead. You only gain the difference you made. You need to note that some brokerages do not allow you to "gain" the entire value of the shares as cash (since, in that case, anybody would be able to short tons of stocks for more cash to use, even if they're losing money).
It's offset by your maintenance excess, which is essentially your usable margin (credit), so the entirety that value effectively becomes unusable, in a roundabout way (it becomes an ordinary trade, and you don't gain anything but the difference between the price you shorted the stock and the price the stock is currently at).
If your positions are failing (stock goes up), your maintenance excess drops, bottlenecking the usable money on your account to both long buy and short sell. This is for the brokerage to cover your loss. Of course, I've heard that this varies between brokerages, as they handle margin differently, and may be prone to something called free-riding if you close quickly after opening a position (I'm in Canada, which prevents this from happening, but the U.S. may be different).
Anyways, point is, short selling is just the opposite of long buying. Whatever you can do with a long buy, you can do with a short sell. It's just the opposite direction, and may have margin implications.
First off you don't get "paid right away" for any stock transaction, it takes a few days for the shares to transfer. Of course you can sell any stock at any time. Why do you think the price of a stock goes down? Because people are more interested in selling than buying at that moment. How quickly you can buy or sell a stock depends on its volume - any decent stock will have enough volume to support a trade the size of yours. If you are talking about some crappy penny stock it may take a day or longer to sell.
Yes you can sell stock if the price of the stock is dropping
If the stock is being sold on an exchange, the sale will at the worst, trade at the bid price. If you are selling a penny stock, you just hope you can sell
All equity trades in the US securities market settle on the settement day of the trade which is thee business days following the day of the trade
So the proceeds of the sale are due you on the settement date of your trade
Don't worry about the mistakes in your question, at least you were smart enough to ask. - Hope I could help
you can always place a limit order to get a minimum amount for your order
can you sell the stock if price of a stock is going down, will it (execution of sell) take time, (someone has to buy my (sell) stocks) or it will execute and i will get paid right away? if i sell lots of stock, if you receive my meaning!!!
thank you for mistakes in my question!
