RE:RE:House Positions and Unusual TradingYou can't really tell when the shorts are taken or covered.
All you can see is in hindsight. That is what makes keeping track of short interest so difficult and allows the shorters to play under the radar.
On the last day of the month and the 15th day, the total short interest held that day is tallied and reported and then published 3 days later by the stock exchanges, (or at least that is when I can get it), such as TSX. I believe this is the same for other major exchanges, but OTC only publishes 10 days later after these q 2 weekly filing or reporting deadlines. Why OTC gets to wait so long before their short interest is made public is a mystery.
In Canada, IIROC also publishes the short interest
taken during the same 2 week periods by all traders as a whole, and they publish this the day after, i.e., the 1st of the month and the 16th, I believe. This is not at all the same as the total outstanding short interest, but is a total of how many shorts were taken out in a period.
So, I am only making an educated (I hope) guess that, given about 200,000 shorts were taken in early October 2 weeks, and about 400,000 shorts were newly taken in the last two weeks of October, and then 1.6 M (if memory serves.... was posted here) were taken in the first two weeks of November, yet the overall short interest held was steady at about 2.1 or 2.2 M at the end of each of these periods, a substantial number if not the majority of the 1.6 M shorts taken early in the first two weeks of November (before the cc and in anticipation of the bear raid after the cc) were covered before the 15th of Nov. This is how a bear raid works: knock down the price through $3 margin calls, stop loss selling, and retail holder ("wow... share price going down, must be something bad I don't know about") panic, then buy back and cover when it looks like you have driven the stock as low as it might go over a week or a month. But, if the short is held over the 2 week period, you would notice the total short interest to be up corresponding to the increased short interest taken in the 2 weeks, and this was not the case recently for TOS. This is why I presume most of the initial shorts quickly covered (their tracks and their borrowed shares) when the sp dropped in the first few days or weel before the 15th. You just can't see this while it is happening.
IIROC has previously sought input into investor and dealer opinions about making the short interest more transparent, and they came up with this reporting of the taking of a short interest volume, but it is obviously not in the interest of professionals who work for brokers and who do bear raids or who short a stock and then trash it in the financial press, for example, to have short interest totals or purchases published daily or weekly, and these are the ones who have the clout with IIROC.
And, in Canada, you must settle your short in 3 days following taking it, just as in a share purchase. 'Naked shorting' is not allowed. I am not aware of clearing house in Canada like DTCC in the US that might facilitate a shorter on OTC market not covering and keeping a naked short outstanding for up to 10 days by the manipulations as in that paper you posted, after which time the trade would be a 'failed trade' and against the rules. (It has also been suggested to me that a Canadian broker with a US affiliate or partner can transfer a short interest into the OTC market without trading the short in the OTC market. I don't know how this would work or how it could be allowed, but IIROC did not seem to think such a thing was possible or allowed. But, the OTC market is huge and relatively unregulated, except that you do have to register your trades...)
It will be interesting to see the OTC short interest in TSTIF on Friday, if it is available, but the data will be a couple of weeks old, at least, being from Nov 15. And, the only connection with the present wild and abnormal trading volume coming through TD 7 that I can see is that TD trading was larger than usual for them in TOS following the cc and the bear raid, but not crazy wild....until...after the short interest reporting deadline of November 15... :
It was only after the 15th of November that the TD volumes really exploded. Hence, my question, "What else is going on here?" Is someone trading in and out of short interest since the 15th in huge volumes, but not trying to bring the sp down much or up (except at the close today... lol), just holding the sp around a certain number? What is the point? And, why go spend so much (>$400,000) to do this? And, we won't see a correlation with the changes in the OTC market short interest that happened over the past week for almost another month, long after this nefarious trade is done...and the share price has recovered nicely on great news...and, I hope, a wonderful short squeeze. :)
| Broker Positions for C:TOS Broker #7 from 20161114 to 20161123 |
| 20161114 |
312,535 |
783,549 |
2.507 |
300,300 |
751,864 |
2.504 |
12,235 |
12,235 |
-31,685 |
-31,685 |
| 20161115 |
1,088,170 |
2,834,236 |
2.605 |
1,080,400 |
2,773,180 |
2.567 |
7,770 |
20,005 |
-61,056 |
-92,741 |
| 20161116 |
1,688,550 |
4,641,793 |
2.749 |
1,694,670 |
4,645,513 |
2.741 |
-6,120 |
13,885 |
3,720 |
-89,021 |
| 20161117 |
2,458,015 |
6,495,407 |
2.643 |
2,493,490 |
6,534,420 |
2.621 |
-35,475 |
-21,590 |
39,013 |
-50,008 |
| 20161118 |
1,589,850 |
4,221,290 |
2.655 |
1,584,855 |
4,182,772 |
2.639 |
4,995 |
-16,595 |
-38,518 |
-88,526 |
| 20161121 |
1,324,191 |
3,627,230 |
2.739 |
1,290,800 |
3,533,503 |
2.737 |
33,391 |
16,796 |
-93,727 |
-182,253 |
| 20161122 |
783,560 |
2,084,404 |
2.66 |
778,647 |
2,060,921 |
2.647 |
4,913 |
21,709 |
-23,483 |
-205,736 |
| 20161123 |
2,606,180 |
7,009,082 |
2.689 |
2,589,605 |
6,950,168 |
2.684 |
16,575 |
38,284 |
-58,914 |
-264,650 |
| TOTAL |
11,851,051 |
31,696,991 |
2.675 |
11,812,767 |
31,432,341 |
2.661 |
|
38,284 |
|
-264,650 |