Illest, for us average retail small fish fry investors, it is difficult to near impossible to know exactly what is going on in the stock and between IR and investment firms trading the stock, who knows.
What does seem apparant is that shorts are covering right now in a very big way. Look at today's action.
20130308|RFMK|12206444|0|137179867|O
I think that is a record for RFMK in terms of being the highest volume day with the least amount of shorting. The shorting now is a mere 8% or lower which is incredibly low for RFMK which as you stated has been getting shorted daily for months up to about 50% and often over 50% on any given day. We are witnessing massive short covering right now IMO.
I do not agree though that it necessarily means IR is providing newly issued shares to hand over to the shorts for low cost covering. If that was the case then as a loyal long shareholder I would be extremely pissed off at management and I would likely dump my position and never look back. Let us hope that is not what is happening. If there is a massive UNREPORTED short position in RFMK then let the shorts cover by buying up real shares from real investors at market price; very simple. According to the biweekly short figures it has always appeared that there is basically NO long term short positions held in RFMK, so I am not so sure of the large short position theory. Then again we only can know about those short positions which firms REPORT to FINRA. If they don't report the shorts they have on their books no one can know about them unless or until regulators give them that fateful call to show their books and force them into some sort of mandated buy-in, but that is rare, more often they just give those criminal shorty firms a slap on the wrist and a small $20,000 fine or something with maybe a month or two suspension, meanwhile the firm pockets all the proceeds from illicit short sales typically to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. It's a broken system right now, to see how widespread it is just go visit the FINRA "compliance" section of the website and see how many firms are getting caught not reporting the proper short figures and getting fined or suspended by FINRA/SEC, etc, each and every month.
There are also indirect ways to guesstimate the short sale levels over time by way of examining the failures to deliver (for aged short positions) but alas, the DTCC "chill" somehow allows the possibility of no FTD report which can usually be found on the SEC (failsdata) site. IMO it is ALL PHONY VOLUME. Anytime you see 50M+ shares trade in a day, especially when it looks like 200M+ shares trade daily, you can just think how much of that volume is fake, just smoke and mirrors, an illusion to put traders/flippers in a frenzy of buying and selling so they can game the sheeple even harder. I seriously doubt IR has any part in any of the volume whatsoever. Frankly, I do not understand why you continue to be of the opinion that management is somehow gaming the stock. Management can barely pay the bills for a growing business coming out of the development stage and into operations, they would never have the ability or potential to measure up against the billions backing the large hedge funds, MMs and firms of whom play hundreds of OTC stocks daily using trading bots connected to hundreds of millions of dollars (pooled and leveraged monies) at their disposal. Let me make a statement which may not sit very well with the longs but the truth sometimes is awful to hear : IMO, the float is in NO WAY LOCKED UP by the longs. That is entirely wishful thinking! There are probably at most a couple hundred longs in RFMK and the rest are just interested traders/flippers going in and out every once in a while for a day or two while they pump or bash the stock on message boards. The big money can move this stock anywhere they wish, down into triple zeros or up into pennies, IMO the PPS is totally at their whim. Rough to hear but the truth, indeed. I do not in any way shape or form agree with your thesis that should IR supposedly sell newly issued shares to shorts to cover that somehow the float would be locked up tight. The shorts would look to then dump those shares as soon as possible to rid themselves of the risk such a long position would entail. IMO the stock already has enough liquidity! The O/S is almost 2B!!!! It is enough liquidity already.
RFMK in the pinky scam swamp world of manipulated stocks is just another ticker trading vehicle at the whim of market manipulators with the big stack of chips. For an example of the kind of phony volume ("cross-trading") which so often happens in the scum swamp, feel free to read the litigation which just came out today about a UK hedge fund manager manipulating dozens of penny stocks and a $200M scam. I am sure that in each of the stocks that were victimized by this fraudulent scheme there were some who were daily pounding the table about how management was to blame for continuously dumping newly issued free trading shares onto the market, calling those companies dilution scams, meanwhile there was some crony big hedge fund manager behind ALL of the trading making himself rich with illegal illicit profits off the backs of the sheeple. Sad.
http://www.fbi.gov/losangeles/press-releases/...-in-losses
The dark side clouds everything.
GLTY
$RFMK
