Daily Short Volume Isn't Just Short Sales

[icemandios]

Case in point, the bot found in DD_IEF under OPK-ALERTS (and anywhere else you might find such data). The most likely source of this kind of data is FINRA.

What Investors Should Know About FINRA Daily Short Sale Volume Data

Trading only reported to FINRA that are published to the public

"First, Short Sale Daily Volume File only includes trades that are published to the public (Public media trade reports[2]), not the offsetting trades that are reported to FINRA for regulatory oversight and/or clearing (Regulatory non-media trade reports[3]"

If the market maker lacks inventory of a stock that you are buying, he sells it to you by going short

"Whenever the market maker does not have a long position in the stock, its sales will be reported as short sales."

"If a market maker is representing an investor’s long sell order in their displayed quote (otherwise known as Limit Order Display), the public media report trade will show up as a short sale, and the long sale will be a regulatory non-media report. In the above situations, trades initiated by a natural buyer or a long seller, the media trade reports will be marked as short sales. This further creates confusion about short activity in the market."

"As the above examples demonstrate, FINRA Short Sale Daily Volume File conflates directional investors (who have a true intent to sell short) with market maker short selling activity (who incur temporary short positions in order to provide liquidity to buyers) into one confusing number. This method of publication causes the aggregate volume to appear to reflect a higher concentration of directional short sale activity than is occurring."

Comment: It is left to the discretion of the reader of Daily Short Sale Volume to decide whether such data can be taken as representative, or proportional, of short selling, but one thing I can say with certainty is that Total Volume (under that heading) is only a fraction of actual total volume:

On 4/23, OPK did 6.1M, preceded by 2.4M and 3.6M. 4/10 was 12.2M preceded by 14.2M.

As for the rest of the Daily Short Sale Volume data.......see above.

[luxetvox]

Sept 30, 2015 17:37:42 GMT icemandios said:

Comment: It is left to the discretion of the reader of Daily Short Sale Volume to decide whether such data can be taken as representative, or proportional, of short selling, but one thing I can say with certainty is that Total Volume (under that heading) is only a fraction of actual total volume:

I've never really understood the reporting, nor the meaning of these rather arcane data. And I've also never really paid attention to stats like short interest, short volume, P/C ratios, etc.

One reason is that the drivers of every company I own, save Opko, are not related to trading or technicals or synthetic activity where the stock price becomes an artifact of the machinations of mysterious levers pulled by mysterious manipulators. Manipulators who are often inferred to have nefarious intent or are only interested in the mathematical discrepancies between a company's underlying equity and its derivative securities.

Except for Opko, the valuations of companies I own, which is to say their stock prices, are a distillation of corporate news and corporate financial results, both of which fall at the feet of the corporate executives in charge of the joints.

In my view, while the stock price has been a disaster, equally disappointing is that the guys running Opko are manifestly disconnected from the shareholder base. News is now so sparse that, when there is the occasional release, the effect is perversely like the boy who cried wolf.......no one is paying attention. The company is 'on ignore' among the investor class. All but a very few are waiting either for the inevitable, or the unfathomable: either a voluntary or involuntary end to the reign of permaFrost, invented and maintained by one intractable man for what seems like an ice age.

And so there are valiant attempts to fill the void with data on the number of closes above $1.20 over some arbitrary time frame, how many shareholders did or didn't vote for Frost and his cronies, tea leaf interpretations of daily trading activity, and so on. We have no meat to chew on. The CEO has decided that we do not deserve to be thrown anything even resembling a bone.