RE: SHORTS REDUCINGI find it hard to "celebrate" after we've been robbed for over two months. Yes, the number is lower, but it's still too high. Consider the shorts had us down to $8.40 this morning, down by 98 cent or 10.5%!! What blatant manipulations!
Anyway, I hope the company is going to do some tangible counter-measures, such as (you suggested) have the insiders doing some buying, or announcing a company share buy back plan to tell the shorters the company is going to protect its SP. Either way it would tell the investors that there is nothing wrong with the company and also any "artificial sales" (selling shares back and forth to drive down the price) would be swallowed up.
Perhaps best of all would be an earlier release of the Q4/YE results (instead of March 14?) to show how profitable the operation is. Then the investors sitting on the sideline with doubts on SMF would start to reverse the game on the shorters and create a short covering run.
By the way here is the FP link
https://www.financialpost.com/markets/data/market-short_pos.html