My experience is that the naked shorts never ever cover unless forced and their is precious little under present rules and regulations that force them to cover but economics does play into it. The best thing we can hope for at this time IMO is for T+0 to become the law of the land. That would eliminate naked shorting. What I have witnessed in the past is that one method the shorts will utilized when caught is to buy shares in the market and run the stock price up higher than it would normally go and then sell shares they purchased and short others driving the price back down. Throw in a hit piece or two and a class action for good measure. This behavior recently occurred with OSTK which by way of disclosure I own. Might be a good stock for IPIX longs to watch the trading of or at the least review the chart for the last 6 months. Hope that helps. Go IPIX!!!