It is my opinion that they fully intended to cover their shares on the final index rebalancing completed in March, a large buyer seems to have stepped in prior to that point leading to an extra 3 million odd shares being sold short to control the price for the rebalancing. If you look at the drop after the 17th march it would have closed their position had the short position held steady at its level early January.
supposing it seems these guys have had a good information flow behind the scenes they surely know that there's multiple sources of news flow on the way and they probably decided to dump prior to the quarterly to begin a dump from retail. And to be fair sentiment here showed it was probably not far from working!.
I'm unaware of any further indices asm is in that they could manipulate to cover to it does seem they do indeed have to cover on market at this point. It remains to be seen how that plays out.
ASM Price at posting:
$1.18 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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