I don't think we should worry too much about the legalities of...

I don't think we should worry too much about the legalities of shorting and activities around it, the Royal Commission into Banking showed how little these large and greedy institutions cared for legalities or ethics, plus it showed ASIC is pretty much useless in enforcement.

Artificial Intelligence is certainly the future so I asked it about shorting and Clinuvel and the answer it gave me was .... Regal. I have asked it over quite a few days and it keeps saying Regal and I have no reason to doubt it. I checked the latest Regal report on the ASX and they are short 11 healthcare companies and over at Polynovo on Hotcopper they are often mentioned in the thread as shorting them. They don't seem to be ethically opposed to shorting healthcare companies to make a buck, I certainly wouldn't do it especially when one day your own family member may desperately need something from one of those companies. It is easy enough to see who Regal has long positions in in Healthcare, eg CSL and AI comfirmed they aren't shorting CSL.

So assuming they are shorting CUV then it follows they would want to keep a very close eye on share price action, forums, sentiment etc surrounding Clinuvel as they are extremely tightly held and lightly traded - and the shorter holds a massive and extremely risky position with CUV. My opinion is there is probably only one shorter otherwise when the share buyback was announced we would have seen a scramble to close out positions, but we actually saw the opposite, the shorter (I assume) opened about half a million more open short positions to control the price action or it would have skyrocketed. Can't imagine who else would decide it was time to start shorting the very profitable Clinuvel just when they announced a share buyback which will only use a tiny percentage of their massive cash reserves. Plus the Clinuvel EPP monopoly position is possibly the best it has ever been right now and the Vitiligo Phase 3 blockbuster is in progress.

I think it is worth doing a bit more digging into the activities of who is shorting Clinuvel, their motives, strategies and ASIC investigations and data etc. Anyone who is shorting a company which is the only one to have brought some treatment to children suffering the terrible disease of EPP, and in the future potentially horrendous diseases like XP or Parkinson's, deserves close scrutiny.

All IMO DYOR