You'd think FINRA short sale data ought to stay fairly consistent from day to day in terms of % short sales, if what we're seeing is just normal market maker activity, temporarily shorting and quickly covering to make the market run smoothly.

It shouldn't be varying from the low 20% to low 50% range. So there is some data to be teased out of there -- we just don't have a handle on it yet.

I do not believe that there is new shorting going on now -- hence the much lower percentage of short sales, perhaps? Could it be that the "normal" market-maker related shorting is somewhere around 15-25%, and what we see above that is complexly related to actual shorting, and also related to volume? (In a fast market, maybe market makers really DO need to temporarily short more?)

I'm really annoyed by this whole FINRA thing because we ought to be able to spot a pattern in it -- but the above is just a guess based on what seems to be the pattern recently. We know that humans have "pattern bias" and tend to see patterns where none exist, or wrong patterns, so..... arrgh.