I've been somewhat busy lately (not given to hyperbole...) but now relaxing with a glass of red while listening to Leonard Cohen (I was never quite warned off by Neil - "He's gonna get us and turn us all into vampires! And we'll all be dead and yet still alive! Like
Leonard Cohen!"). The song seemed vaguely appropriate to the mood in recent threads (but was it the chicken or merely the egg?)
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
But anyway, that is a complete digression because all I really meant to say was
1. Company announcements are made to the
stock exchange. See the link for the past six months of announcements. It is a bit unfair to judge the company based on tardy reporting by the media.
2. The data presented on
shortman is drawn from the
ASIC database and is thus as good as ASIC's information, but presented in a more user friendly way. Short sales are supposed to be
reported to ASIC but please note their disclaimer
"It is important to note that ASIC’s aggregated short position reports are reliant on the accuracy of reports we receive from individual short sellers. While we will monitor compliance with short position reporting and provide additional guidance where necessary, we are unable to verify the accuracy of all individual reports submitted to ASIC, nor to verify that all short sellers in our market (both in Australia and overseas) are lodging reports". It is therefore likely that the ASIC data may understate the true level of short selling. As others have noted, short sales have recently comprised a large portion of daily turnover, (last ten days being 33%, 46%, 57%, 52%, 51%, 33%, 50%, 48%, 32%, 46%). Such large percentages are easily achieved in a low liquidity stock and can thus move the share price rapidly. This has been going on for a while now - aggregate short positions have increased sharply from 0.3% to 3.4% in just a couple of months. Who knows the motiviation of the shorters - accumulation as some have suggested?; or perhaps simply exploiting the cooling after a hot run (Macquarie did the Lithium market no favours...) At some point, though, the short positions will have to be cleared and then we may see a very pleasing run.
