Well I often struggle to understand the varying tactics of the...

Well I often struggle to understand the varying tactics of the institutions playing with shorts! However, I would suggest that the shorters have been active all day, short covering this morning (ie buying), flicking the switch around 1.30pm & shorting this afternoon (ie selling) - and probably ending up with the same number of shorts they started with.

A few notes:
- there are currently 19.5m shorts outstanding (as at today's ASIC report to 22 Mar) which notionally are worth around $200m, & they haven't been significantly changing
- based on ASX's daily shorts reports, last week saw an average of around 760k new shorts per day
- if the overall outstanding shorts aren't changing much, that implies daily shorters are simply "playing" with an average of around $7m to $8m worth of shares every day
- if they can make just 1% with their "playing", that's $70k to $80k, 2% $140k to $160k etc - & today's share price as you can see below, rose over 4%, then dropped 3%
- very doubtful if the 200k+ spike today at 1.39pm was just a coincidence with the subsequent price decline
- & of course just the normal huge volume in the closing auction naturally wouldn't be institutions rebalancing their accounts after the day's "playing", in preparation for another day of fun & games tomorrow (does that sound too cynical?)

On the brighter side, when you look at the LYC chart not far short of its 10 year high & look at the pattern of when the outstanding shorts were accumulated, it's hard not to conclude the shorters are significantly under water about now on those $200m worth of borrowed shares

Let's hope that situation only worsens for them sooner than later & forces at least a small short squeeze!