RE:It always amazes me to see what some think about shortseller Never said stupid or ignorant, often overly greedy for sure...
the short positions will have to pay the dividend and they don't care they have paid a bunch of times already.
The simple math says if on average since the short began we have over 12% of trade volume being shorts. Then the price drop is due to those shorts. As they over supply the market and price is supply/demand driven.
when the shorts close they will over time and when they do that 12% over supply goes towards 0% (the shorts stop shorting). When the shorts start closing their position and the short supply is at 0% then the shorts closing flip to over demand.
this causes a short squeeze. The meme world saw what happens in extreme squeezes.
In the end it's a question about how big the delta between value and sentiment is factored against the liquidity of the stock impacting the days to close. The big the delta the bigger the swings.
if BCE trades on avg at 5M a day across the 2 exchanges and 500k of that is shorts meaning 4.5M is normal we'll pressure against 5M buy pressure and there is 80m shares short. What does that tell you when that 500k goes away
4.5M sell pressure vs 5M buy pressure the price goes up.
ok now let's say that 5M buy pressure adds another 1M shortclosings so it's 6M buy pressure vs 4.5M sell. Again price goes up but faster now.
what happens when price goes up fast that 1M shorts closing also start to wind up faster amplifying but pressure and that's the nature of the squeeze.