A heavy contributor to the frustrating share price movement has...

A heavy contributor to the frustrating share price movement has been much increased shorting in the last few days, culminating in a quite incredible 37m+ shorts last Friday - that's out of ASX + ChiX turnover of probably around 105m-110m shares.

If you are interested in specific figures, the table below summarises recent shorting activity. I have calculated the rough % of turnover by assuming ChiX would have added 10% to the reported ASX turnover - although I notice that so far today ChiX appears to have contributed 15.7m out of the nearly 40m turnover!

In any case, the % rises from 15 Jun onwards indicate substantially more daily shorting going on - and the end result of the first of those days (15 Jun) was that overall shorts actually reduced (on top of a sharp drop of 2.8m on 14 Jun), meaning there was even more short covering (ie buying) in the day by the shorters than there were new shorts.

ASIC will report in the next two days on outstanding shorts for 16/17 Jun, so it will be interesting to see whether the total shorts keep reducing or start to again head upwards. Whichever way you look at it, we could do without this sort of shorting attention, with today looking like much more of the same. There is really no point trying to guess what the shorters are up to, but ASX200 inclusion can sometime bring this baggage with it for new entrants.