I've been noting that there's been increasing short selling of WBT in recent months.
You can call it bots, you can call it manipulation or just what happens when there's no commercial deal announced. Regardless, the fact is that the level of net shorts have been increasing and I believe it is having a material impact on the share price.
Firstly, some info on shorting:
ASX reports gross shorts (ie. total shares sold in a short capacity) on a T+1 basis here: https://www.asx.com.au/data/shortsell.txt These are normally updated around 11am. The confusing thing about these numbers is you don't know if they also simultaneously covered (or if there is more than one shorter, then you don't know if one is shorting while the other is covering).
ASIC reports net shorts on a T+4 basis. They update around 1pm (but last few days there's been some issues/delays). There's some helpful websites like shortman.com.au and 61financial that use this data and create some helpful charts like this.
You can see here, net shorts have risen from essentially nil to over 400K.
You might argue that that's only 0.33% of shares on issue so immaterial. I get that, but look at the increase relative to daily turnover and it becomes more material. In recent weeks, it's often been 10-20% of daily turnover. These additional marginal trades have helped drop the price from where it was sitting around the $2.20 mark to current levels.
Looking at last Friday, gross shorts were 37,444 which was 13.5% of daily turnover. Those extra sell orders keep pushing the price down and is aiming to keep a lid on the share price despite the good news about the selector (you can see the big spike in the yellow line (shorts) just after the announcement.
The thing to remember is they have to buy the shares back at some stage. When the announcement eventually comes, the short squeeze will be intense...
(20min delay)