NO individual investor knows the actual short interest now. There is NO basis for insisting that “the shorted shares have not been covered” — absolutely no way for us to know, and unlikely in the extreme give that professional traders protect their profits. Do you think someone who shorted at 1.00 or less would just sit there and watch their profits evaporate?

To say that there is “no catalyst” may or may not be correct. We INDIVIDUALS don’t know, but the hedge funds always have sources within companies and often within clinical trials so that they have advance information. That’s why some daytraders simply look at price and volume and jump on board stocks that are going up — they know that odds are the big guys have advance information and are buying before the news comes out to the rest off us.

Just because WE don’t know if there is a catalyst, that doesn’t mean THEY don’t know.

Sometimes the trading gangs run a stock up, by their illegal but never punished collusion, and then short at the top. Take a look at AVXL a few years back, which was run up to 19 and then crashed back to 3. This was entirely because of illegal collusion, which they gloated about on lieHUB.

I am the first to agree that there probably has been illegal naked shorting, as there so often is on OTC stocks.

However — the volume and extreme and fast move in this stock certainly does not support the idea that there has been no short covering. NOT to cover in a move that is so dramatic is utterly contrary to the methods that professional traders use.

Does anyone really think that all of the upward volume we’ve seen is buying and zero short-covering? Very doubtful.
Think any individual trader know what ts really going on? Even more doubtful.