AJM Chart, page-4859

That is just a day spike in shorts but I am not sure if takes into account interim day closure. Look at the accumulated shorts, under 2% of entire issuance. Take a look at the generic LIT etf and flip the majors across the sector and you will see this isn't a short manipulating the SP trend.

If I had to make an educated guess taking into considerations of the mine start up recently, I would say it was LT holder's prudence to hedge their shorter term bearish sentiment since the blue sky is now over and a direct measure of the mine performance against their output, operational smoothness and all the measurable parameters such as price of the commodity they produced. You can see this "logic" playing out in PLS ever since they started shovelling the resource to production.

That 19C when I was looking at this chart sometime ago on a horizontal basis makes sense to buy confluence roughly with the uptrend line. One never know how the market will take a stock price in any direction so I have given up on prediction a long time ago and I always get a laugh when folks predict price level as well as a time it gets there. You can probably calculate the odds of that happening!

Good luck.