I see your point. A short cover is resolved by buying - agreed....

I see your point. A short cover is resolved by buying - agreed. I also agree there was no effective covering of a large percentage of the quoted securities.

My assertion however is that there was a no large transaction at all. Simply put, one or more short selling lenders did not lodge their report for the day. Hence the ASIC numbers did not include the full short-sold total for one day. I have seen this regularly on shorted stocks I am tracking.

Also any actual transaction/s would need to be reported regardless whether on or off-market as they are quoted on the ASX. They may be reported as after hours special cross-trades for example, but as I suggested I don't think there was such a transaction for a large number of shares.

In answer to your question:"How can you cover 3.8% in a day without a change in substantial holder notice?":

The reporting of substantial holding changes of an existing substantial holder (5% or more) are required by ASIC when the change to the holding exceeds 1% of quoted securities. Therefore for example, 4 or more substantial holders could change their large holding by up to 0.99% of the total quoted shares to give a change of 3.8% without triggering a substantial change notice.