As shorting is an effective mechanism to de-risk price...

As shorting is an effective mechanism to de-risk price volatility in futures contract this makes stocks that operate within largely unregulated markets such as nickel, lithium and graphite to be particularly prone to the presence of future contracts hedge and short holding traders. PLS, SYR and LTR are good example. STX also makes for a good short case study albeit for different reasons. As this is occurring daily on global scale this often creates a situation where commodity pricing fluctuations sometime are merely the result of traders covering their short positions in a multi-million dollar game of pass the parcel. Without the ability to compare both side of the transaction however this makes it very difficult to separate genuine shorts from hedges. As for IMU - listen to @slick. IMU's recent 12% drop in open shorts from 5.5% to 4.8% has left near nothing on the table for anyone other than institutional or registered sophisticated investors such that everything else is background noise. My opinion only of course !