Hi Lenche, I'm not an experienced head but I have gone down a...

Hi Lenche, I'm not an experienced head but I have gone down a few rabbit holes checking out how shorts are reported, the motivation behind how they are used in different situations but more importantly looking for how I might read the reported shorts to gain some sort of insight or confirmation about how price is behaving. It's cool you have put together a format that captures the information that can be useful in the right situation- I'm curious as to how much manual input is involved in putting together that spreadsheet? I ask because I used to get some value out of the Shortman site when they reported daily shorts (as well as the total Nett shorts they still show now) but since they were hit with a cease and desist letter from the ASX, (yay for the level playing field), I just don't have the skills to import the raw data in to a usable format like you have.

I can confirm that yes there is regulation around reporting of daily short sales but brokers have a 4 day window to report so the reported daily short sales (DSS) figures may not always line up with the actual trading day they occurred. When I was watching the DSS for certain stocks I found they made sense most of the time, apart from the occasional outlier- suggesting that most of the brokers were reporting short sales on the same day most of the time.

There may be more sophisticated ways of looking at this, but one of the ways I used Shortman DSS numbers was to check if there was obvious signs shorts were being used to cap price by big players during a consolidation period. When DSS suddenly make up a large percentage of total daily trades at a particular level, but nett shorts are going nowhere- it can tell you something. Day traders perhaps, but over several days or weeks when this is happening then perhaps someone big is trying to build a position. It might sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes when you see daily shorts rising it can mean good things ahead. It'd be good to hear from anyone else with ideas on how you get value from DSS or general short sales info!

Thanks, Rooster