Shorting TD is a Widow Maker says BNN Few things at play here, and at least a pair of them are tied to those U.S. regional bank concerns – namely, there remain questions on how exactly TD’s planned US$13.4-billion acquisition of First Horizon will play out. There are also concerns over the value of TD’s roughly 10 per cent stake in Charles Schwab, which has been caught up in the downdraft that has hit the American banking system. All that said, shorting Canadian banks has long been something of a widow maker trade – with the hefty dividend yields on the Big Six, they end up being an expensive carry (shorts have to pay out dividends to those they borrow the stock from) and given the relative stability of the banking oligopoly in this country, those trades seldom work out.