By your theory, that would mean that the actual individual traders buying today would be about 60,000 shares (24% of the total volume). That seems about right, knowing that lots of us bought yesterday but not today (at least based on PMs and emails people sent me), and knowing that my colleague bought fairly big today.

So AlanC's theory that the FINRA number tells us real, not fake market maker manipulation, trading -- is one way of looking at that number, which has varied from 7-78%.

Someone posted quite a while ago that they knew a trader who had figured out how to interpret that data to give guidance for trading. It means something, we just aren't positive what.

Note to those new to Alan's FINRA numbers: that number is not the twice-monthly short interest number, it's the amount of shares sold short during the day. Many of those shares are covered during the same day. We've been trying to figure out how to interpret the daily number because it varies so much from day to day.