FINRA data now shows only 28 million GME short volume over the past 3 days vs 67 million from Feb 24-26. With total trade volume also dropping 60% this week, could this be a sign of 💎✋ and low availability of shorts? 💎✋💎🚀🚀🚀

Author	Source
u/Cuttingwater_	Reddit

Hello again my fellow apes🦍🦍🦍!

BOILERPLATE:

I still know nothing, I can’t do math good. PLEASE don’t listen to me! Obligatory 🚀🚀🚀

WARNING:

I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT BY THE END OF MY POST YOU MAY EXPERIENCE SYMPTOMS SUCH AS EUPHORIA OR PREMATURE 🚀 SYNDROME. THESE ARE SIDE EFFECTS OF ‘CONFIRMATION BIAS’. TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR TO LEARN MORE.

If you haven’t seen my earlier posts, check them out here (post 1, post 2, post 3). The automods at r/wallstreebets are annoyingly strict, so I will be posting in r/GME from now on.

I’ve been told that, for some, my posts have too many words and numbers, so to appease my smooth brained 🦍, I put together some ‘Aliens’ memes to summarize the current situation. Enjoy 😉

Part 1: FINRA Data

I put together the FINRA daily short data for the last week and you can see an increase in short volume over the last 8 days! http://regsho.FINRA.org/regsho-Index.html or https://www.FINRA.org/FINRA-data/short-sale-volume-daily

(Note: if you want to find this raw data, use the link above and you will need to go into each day’s file (updated at 6pm daily) and search for GME, then copy the raw numbers. the top of the document will show you what each number corresponds to - this is not a user-friendly document)

Short and total volume have both gone down significantly but we are still averaging 57% of total volume. There was only an additional 8 million in short volume today, for a total of 28 million this week. We expected to see more short volume after GME went off the SSR list, but it has continued to be a very low volume trading week. However, the short volume as % of total daily volume is the same levels that we saw on Jan 27-29 when there was a concerted effort to bring down the share price.

CAVEATS ON DAILY SHORT VOLUME:

This data does not include NYSE, which is why total volume for today is 38M but actual total vol is 90 million. In a previous post we confirmed that while the FINRA data is just a sample, its large enough to be considered representative of the full market
Daily data does NOT equate to % of total shares that are shorted, as the same share could be shorted multiple time and there are other things that lenders do which could be considered ‘shorting’ but is not what we would usually define. The best data is the monthly FINRA data but that only comes out once a month but that’s no fun at all!

Here are my data tables, again all taken from the FINRA daily data.

Assumptions used:

GME Float Stock: 54,490,000 (this is more pessimistic than some reports of only 45M)
GME Total Shares: 69,750,000

The FINRA site also now lists GME short % of float at 60.35% ( http://finra-markets.morningstar.com/MarketData/EquityOptions/detail.jsp?query=14%3A0P000002CH&sdkVersion=2.58.0 )

Unfortunately there is no citation or link to where they are getting this number, but it is the FINRA site, so it should be as LEGIT as it can get.

Part 2: Borrowing Shares

Two other things to note are the decrease in available shorted shares and the increase in fees associated with shorting GME.

The data available through iborrowdesk.com (https://iborrowdesk.com/report/GME ). For those wondering about the site, check out the about page; the site uses text files from Interactive Broker’s FTP site (https://iborrowdesk.com/about ).

Note: This data does not take into account all available shorts since it is just looking at Interactive Broker, but is a good gauge for how easy it is to get shorts and how much they cost.

Here we can see that the number of shares available for short selling has gone from 2 million (at 1.1% borrow rate) to only 200,000 at 4.8% borrow rate!

The last 3 days have been very interesting with share availability going from 450,000 (EoD March 1) to 50,000 (Mid-day March 2) to 200,000 (EoD March 3).

These observations may suggest that nearly all available stocks were shorted on Tuesday morning to counter the rally on Monday while GME was on the SSR list. Nevertheless, we are still down 50% in available shares to short since Monday.

Part 3: ETFs

There has been no change in the level of shorting for ETFs (XRT still shorted >100% which equates to ~550,000 GME shares or 1% of float).

If you would like more detail around ETFs, check out my last post, but I’ll still put all the source links below

NOTE: you cannot squeeze an ETF as it is just a collection of shares, the fund can increase and decrease the total number of shares it owns as the size of the fund grows / shrinks. This is why the article above was talking about an outflow of money from the ETF

TLDR:

THEY ARE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO STOP THIS ROCKET JUST LIKE LAST TIME, BUT 💎🙌 💎 WILL PREVAIL!!!

Stake: Shares in GME 🚀 🚀 🚀