| Author | Source |
|---|---|
| u/boneywankenobi |
I did some digging after the [revelation that XRT is being supremely shorted in an effort to hide / carry the true short interest of GME] (https://www.reddit.com/r/GME/comments/lknjkc/xrt_is_being_used_to_hide_gme_shorts_xrt/). So let’s dive in to what I found.
First - XRT has around 1M shares of GME in ETF - so if we look at the total amount of short shares at 180% of short interest that is around 1.8M shares short. Big number, but…. just the tip. So this got me thinking: what other ETFs have shares of GME that could be used in a similar way. What I found demonstrated that that isn’t a huge number compared to the ocean but rather the highest percentage of shares to value. There are two larger stocks we can look at: IJR and IWM.
Second - now let’s dive into those ETFs. IJR has around 9M shares short right now which when looking at short interest as a percentage of float is 9M / (616M-429M ) or around 5% which is quite low. However, this is incredibly misleading as GME is just a small volume of the total and it is a delayed number. However, I stumbled upon another eye opener: What happened to the short volume over the last 3 days?!?! It jumped from 17% to 37% which is crazy! What else happened during that time? GME short volume crashed from increasing daily to 25% to 18% on the exact same day.. Sure, short volume isn’t short interest but there is a correlation. And that big of a jump happening in both at the same time is a huge red flag. I suspect that short interest in IJR has skyrocketed in the last few days and the low short interest is due to it being old and not being used for shorting at the end of Jan.
Third - Let’s take a look at the second biggest by total shares: IWM. IWM has 94M shares shorted. As a percentage of total shares which are 293M that is around 35%. But wait, IWM also has more shares owned by institutions than exist. So that number has got to be much bigger in reality than the numbers available are telling us. This ETF is INSANELY shorted as well with 1.64M shares of GME.
There are around 10M shares that are currently in ETFs for GME, this accounts for just over half so I didn’t bother looking at the rest.
Fourth: Institutions own 4X THE NUMBER OF SHARES THAT EXIST OF XRT. So that is just adding to the insanity for that ETF.
Let me do a quick TLDR: XRT is super shorted, but there are other ETFs with suspect behavior. IWM with a crazy short position and lower percentage of GME. IJT had crazy short volume spike at the exact same time that the GME short volume plummeted.
I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advise, just analysis based on available information.