| Author | Source |
|---|---|
| u/ThrowMoneyAway38 |
I’ve been looking through the GME volume numbers put out by individual exchanges to try and get a sense of the actual short volume, and oh wow is it a doozy. Buckle in, apes. This information is accurate to the best of my knowledge and ability, but does not constitute financial advice. I am but monke, so please correct me if I get anything wrong.
TL;DR Fintel has been using numbers for total volume covering many exchanges, but only reports short volume from a subset of those exchanges, which makes short % look smaller. In the past two weeks, there there were very few (if any) shares on the market that weren’t short. That being said, shorters maybe able to juggle for a while.
As some of you may know, I’ve been looking a little deeper into Fintel’s numbers to see what discrepancies there may be. Information is power and I want to make it so everyone here can make decisions based on information that is as accurate as possible. As it is currently, Fintel reports an aggregate total volume from many exchanges, but only reports some of the short volume from NYSE and Nasdaq. The company (Hi, Wilton!) insists that they’re working on adding in short volume from CBOE. I have no idea what other markets there are, or where to find the data, so if you know a way that I can get my grubby little mitts on some daily volume and short data for GME in other exchanges, please let me know. The more data I have, the more reliable the information I can provide will be.
In English: Say there are a hundred stores that are all required to report their sales. They all have a tab for regular customers, so these stores report the total sales and of those the number of sales that went on a tab. It’s annoying, though, because they all publish this info in different places and it’s formatted in a way that’s a pain to input and add up. Someone named Filton says that’s no problem, I’ll do it for you! On Friday last week, he reports that 1,000 people bought bananas, and 200 of those people put it on their tab. Cool, that means that 20% of the buyers bought the bananas on credit, and they’ll pay their respective stores back when the time comes. What Filton isn’t telling you is that 1,000 people bought bananas from ALL the stores, while the 200 people who put it on their tab only came from Bananas ‘R’ Us. That 200 number doesn’t count the 150 people who put it on a tab at Bananamart nor the 75 people who used Bananazon’s tab. The 1,000 people buying bananas already includes Bananamart and Bananazon, but when counting how many people are on tabs, adding Bananamart and Bananazon brings it up up to 425–not the 200 that Filton said it was.
Got it?
Here are actual numbers for GME:
BQN represents NYSE and Nasdaq. KZJY are CBOE exchanges.
BQN represents NYSE and Nasdaq. KZJY are CBOE exchanges.
Money, you may ask, why are your daily sums less than what Fintel reports? Excellent question, rhetorical redditor (ooh, someone make a username with that) I only have data from some exchanges, but even though I only had data for a smaller number of transactions, I was still able to find more short transactions than Fintel. The purple percent represents the short % based on the data I have access to. It is certainly possible that every other transaction is a genuine long sale (I don’t think this is likely, but it is possible), which is represented by yellow in the graph below.
Just take a moment to let this soak in
If the data I have is representative of the rest of the GME market that day, then over half of GME sales were short EVERY DAY between February 1st and February 9th. That means that even if every other transaction were a short seller buying back a share, they would STILL be digging themselves deeper and deeper every day.
I got my data from here (but I would love more sources!):
http://regsho.finra.org/regsho-Index.html
https://www.cboe.com/us/equities/market_statistics/short_sale/?mkt=edgx
Of course I own GME. Melvin can pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Edit 0.1: Minor changes for typos, grammar, and flow
Edit 1: To clarify, the short interest report was due today and will be available on the 24rd of February https://www.finra.org/filing-reporting/regulatory-filing-systems/short-interest
Edit 2: Wilton helpfully pointed out that the exempt number is included in the BQN Short figure. Updated the tables and graph accordingly. Thanks, bud!