In short: No – short selling currently isn't a feature Parqet actively supports. You can technically enter short positions, but our return metrics can't process them correctly. In this article, we explain why and what you can do.

By default, Parqet calculates entry prices (your price per share, excluding fees), price gains and realized gains using the FIFO principle (First In – First Out). This means: Shares bought first are also sold first. This logic requires a buy to take place before the corresponding sell. In the portfolio settings, you can also choose LIFO or the average cost method instead of FIFO. This doesn't help with short selling: All three methods require you to hold shares before a sell.

With short selling, this order is exactly reversed – you first sell shares you've borrowed and only buy them back later to cover the position. Our calculation logic isn't designed for this scenario. As a result, you see incorrect values for returns, gains/losses and sometimes also in the performance chart.

Parqet doesn't warn you when you enter a sell for more shares than you hold. Your holdings then become negative.

The problem is especially noticeable if you've entered a short position and only partially covered it – meaning part of the position is still open. In this case, it can happen that:

Background: The calculation logic wrongly assigns the cost of the shares already covered to the remaining open position instead of showing it as a realized loss. This effect disappears as soon as the short position is fully covered.

In the past, short selling rarely came up among our users, and there's hardly any demand for it today. For this reason, we currently have no plans to officially support this scenario in the near future.

If you'd still like this feature, you can submit it in our feature voting tool or support existing suggestions with your vote. This way, we can see how high the demand is.

As long as your short position is open, the return metrics for this security aren't calculated correctly. Once you've fully covered the position (meaning bought it back), the problem usually resolves itself, because the calculation logic adds up again.

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about the incorrect values in the meantime. If you only want to document individual trades, it may help to keep the position in a separate portfolio (e.g. “Trades” or “Derivatives”) so the overall performance of your main brokerage account isn't distorted.

No. Short/inverse ETFs, put warrants, short knock-outs/turbos and similar leveraged products are regular long positions from Parqet's point of view, in a product that itself bets on falling prices. So you can enter them as a regular buy and sell – the return calculation works as usual here.