Shorting the HFR Train

The almost snail's pace of trading on this stock has made for some interesting watching.  Things happen slowly and in small numbers so specific events stand out.  Just wondering if anyone's got any opinions about how the shorters have affected the trading of this stock?

Following are some data and a graph from shortman.com.au.  First is a table of daily short positions taken on HFR for the last month or so.  Second is a chart of the cumulative short positions on HFR.  Suffice to say that the amount of short positions taken has increased over the last 3 months.  However, as reported on shortman, as a percentage of total capital the short sells are pretty small, especially compared to some other stocks.  I don't exactly know how relevant this.  I would have thought that the number of short sells should be measured against daily traded volumes.  In HFR's case daily traded volume is usually pretty small.  Compare the numbers below to daily volumes traded (not shown) and you'll see daily short positions being anything up to about 50% of the daily trades.

Anyway, to me, short selling could explain a lot of what's going on with the downward manipulation of the SP.  Yesterday and today a huge 50000K order (huge compared to all the other orders) appeared at around $1.42.  Yesterday it was pulled so I thought it was a fake.  Today it got hit so then I started to think about short covering.  It may be an indication that the SP is becoming harder and harder for the shorters to push down and they are looking to get out.  Let's hope.

What I still haven't got my head around is that huge 7mil buy back on 18/9.  All I know is it certainly wasn't me.