The ASIC shorts outstanding (as reported by Shortman) and the...

The ASIC shorts outstanding (as reported by Shortman) and the daily ASX shorts are two quite different figures.

The daily ASX report simply lists how many new shorts (ie sells of borrowed shares) were reported for a day (eg ASX reported 494k new shorts for Mon 20 May). What that does not include is how many short covering buys there were on that day. If those delightful organisations playing these games happened to short cover 494k on Mon, then the ASIC report (tomorrow) of nett outstanding shorts at 20 May, will simply show no change from the 17 May position.

To further highlight all that, ASX reported 136k new TLG shorts on Fri 17 May. ASIC has now reported that the nett outstanding TLG shorts as at 17 May in fact dropped by 15k from the previous day. That implies the gameplayers, on top of their 136k new shorts, also must have short covered 151k shares. As a further example from last Fri, CBA reportedly had 999k new shorts for the day, but the nett outstanding shorts dropped for CBA by 305k, implying short covering of 1036k.

Naturally, that all assumes the reporting to and by ASX and ASIC is accurate - and that simply isn't always the case.

We'll see tomorrow from ASX how many new shorts were involved in today's TLG drop, and the more interesting one will be the report early afternoon from ASIC on the nett outstanding shorts as at last Mon 20 May.