Barely anybody is shorting HIO for the simple reason that almost...

Barely anybody is shorting HIO for the simple reason that almost the entire shareholder register is made up of retail who generally don't have the ability to lend out their shares. Take a look at the top 20, it's all retail and 'nominees' accounts. I'm a long-only investor but I think it would probably be a good short from here if it was even possible - now with 769M shares on issue and at the raise price of $0.08, the market cap will still be >$63M. Before the zero-interest-rate market pump of 2021, CAP/HIO (with exactly the same resource in the ground as it is today) was trading around $10-15M market cap. With the project going nowhere for the foreseeable future, it's hard to see it staying north of $50M market cap, probably much less. I don't get the point of pretending everything is fine, unless you're hoping for a pump to exit.