161mln shares shorted currently and with an aggregated short position of 5.62%, STX is now part of the Top-20 list (#19) of the most shorted stocks at the ASX.
I captured the short trading of STX over the last 4 weeks or so to get a better impression about the current trading pattern by comparing the daily trading volume with the daily reported gross short sales by the ASX and the development of the aggregated short position covered by ASIC:
First some remarks (the pinch-of-salt disclosure...
)
- I do not have the ASX gross short sales figures from Feb 7th and from Feb 13th on hand (anyone can help?). So, two data gaps in the table...
- Trading volume includes off-market trading and hence, some minor differences compared to the table provided by @Saskia today.
- The "Daily Gross Short Sales Report" by the ASX is obviously far from complete. It seems to be clear that this "trading day +1" report covers not the total short selling within a trading day. For example, see the short selling for Tuesday 5th March: for that day the daiIy ASX report showed the gross short selling of 4.282mln shares (which would have represented 14.01% of the daily trading volume, but the aggregated short position raised by 13.259mln shares according to the ASIC report. Hence, the ASX report was likely not complete and the actual short selling on that day represents likely more than 40% of the entire trading volume of the day. I would guess that some short selling entities misses to report on the +1 day basis. => all short sales figures from the daily ASX report shout be read as "at least"!
- The aggregated "trading day +4" reporting by ASIC seems to be more complete but also shows some inaccuracies (e.g. the changes in this report on the two days of trading halt...).
That said,
we have still a huge short selling activities associated with Strike. Short selling is responsible for a large share of the daily trading, but on both sides of the market.
About 60mln shares were covered by the shorters from Feb 15 to 20 after the failure with SE3 testing at around 29c. Another about 20mln shares were covered after the SE2 failure at around 21.5c. Big profit taking for them...
Nevertheless, as
@david said, shorts heading up and are representing a large part of the daily selling queue...
(20min delay)