RE: any estimates on when theI know that I've said this before and there is little information on it, posted on the net.
I took the Canadian Securities Course many years ago and know that you cannot short stocks under a given value. (Basically anything that is listed as a penny stock.)
This is one of the few clips from the net that I found on the matter:
https://beginnersinvest.about.com/cs/newinvestors/a/022703a.htm
So, any stock that is a penny stock and is shown to be shorted is not shorted by individual investors, and IMHO, the position would have had to have been established before the stock slipped into penny status. The only exception I suppose would be hedge funds, but this would be highly unusual, and would never be in amounts of any consequence.
For as insidious as the short trader appears to most people, it provides upside pressure when the squeeze comes into play.
Pure manipulation of a stock is another matter all together and does not provide the long term investor with any benefits.
The stock is trading where it is, because people don't know what is going to happen with the many variables involved with the listing. There seems to be a lot of people posting on this BB who think the management team knows how many shares we will get (on a ratio), what the stock will begin trading at, etc., etc. ... but here again, I assure you, they don't have these numbers so they cannot tell us.
We will get some of this information when the spin off info. comes in early January, but some of the unknowns won't be known until the stock actually begins to trade... the management doesn't know... no one knows... thats investing!