Tyro Payments Price Target Cut 27% to A$2.55/Share by Macquarie, page-28

Viceroy and other unsophisticated shorters play a very transparent game. They are not like the skilled and sophisticated reputable investment firms that take well researched and thoroughly backed short positions on troubled stocks, these guys have a simple strategy that is easy to outline.

All they do is:
1) Find a stock that is in a spot of bad news that is likely to continue for at least a week or two
2) Aggressively short the price down to create fear (they are unlikely to have the funds to do this themselves so they would be supported by other firms on the shorting and offering their publicity and scapegoat services for a fee)
3) Release a storm of media with emotional language playing into the fear and claiming all kinds of things about the company they are shorting
4) Open more short positions (along with their clients) to push the price down further and "validate" the report they released with SP movements
5) Wait for a response form the company and quickly retort with another report with even more claims
6) Close positions and walk away

Fortunately, and wisely, Tyro halted trading right after #3, which did two important things. It stopped the bleeding of the share price from fear giving investors important time to consider their approach, and secondly gave them time to respond well to the claims. This meant it's much harder for viceroy to put their foot on the throat of Tyro and also much harder to close the short positions. Take a look at this clutching of straws from the update...

"Viceroy noted that the replacement cost of Tyro’s bricked customers would likely have cost $12m. This figure is
correct, we used Tyro’s own figures to reverse check this. The company specifies the amount it spends on
terminals, and the number of terminals issued during the year. After factoring in changes in inventory this
gives the average cash cost per terminal, as shown in our previous report."

It's well known that the terminals do not need to be replaced in order to be fixed, they just need a quick in-person repair job. You can smell the desperation in the report, the chaotic formatting, the lack of coherent approach, these guys are out of their depth.

If you look at the shorting information from the ASX there are 4 million shares currently shorted as of 20th January (https://www.asx.com.au/data/shortsell.txt) so the shorting market has been able to close a substantial amount of positions over the last two days (shortman has 13 million shares short at last update) but there is still a way to go before short level is back to normal. Unfortunately, if viceroy themselves closed their positions yesterday then they probably didn't get too wrecked in exiting these positions as the price has hovered around the 2.70-3.00 mark, so this looks like a break even or small profit. However, if the shorters who have closed are the more sophisticated firms that followed viceroy in, and that is a very real possibility, then viceroy might still be bag holding. Judging by the latest release, it seems they do have some positions open, and the SP is rising today... so even though we'll never know for sure what trades they made, if this can shoot up a bit today I think they'll probably be taking some losses and eating noodles in mum's basement for the next few months.

One can only hope!