n00bmasta, I really have tried to comprehend this, and the more...

n00bmasta, I really have tried to comprehend this, and the more I look the more I believe the OTC is seriously a game of smoke and mirrors.
However, the way you present is almost like a new form of maths where 1=2, or if you have a dollar since it has a head and tail side, you have $2, and at some point you realise you are short.
It appears from the bi-monthly REGULATED FINRA figures, per Rule 4560 (which you show in the Bloomy report above) that at the time of reporting the cumulative short position is low, and yes, I had believed it was growing.
The problem appears to be that the Market, MMs and Brokers seem to be using different conventions, which only coalesces in the same convention in the bi-monthly figures. In the interim it seems a free-for-all, especially on the OTC Pink.
Even though OTC is a member of FINRA, by definition the OTC Pink is an open market place with no financial standards or reporting requirements. This means that information like I’ve presented from the OTC Short Report is highly contentious at best, and it is likely that these dodgy MMs report to OTC in totally different ways, and yes many must be reporting a sale as a short for those figures to make sense.

Finra’s rules adopt the convention of only reporting sales as volume, but they do bifurcate between long and short which cancel each other out. As an example, on the day of FINRA reporting 29 Sep, official volume is 32M, OTC reports as 28M, so the concept of declaring each side of the trade (1=2) to add to volume is not validated by those figures (the marginal discrepancy in volume figures probably due to the slackness adopted by MMs to report to the OTC).

Bottom line, how much information coming off the OTC Pink can you really trust. Clearly not daily, and even the FINRA figures have to be considered with some level of scepticism. This is a really dodgy market with unscrupulous players, and what happens in the interim 2 weeks before the official reporting date?

One of many on Tim Hart’s agenda is to uplift. The sooner the better to OTCQX or OTCQB !