“The Misleading” – Daily Short Volume In

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“The Misleading” – Daily Short Volume

In contrast, the most frequently misinterpreted data is the Daily Short Volume, sometimes referred to as Naked Short Interest. This data shows the percentage of published trade reports (called media transactions in FINRA Rules) that were marked short. As an example, the recent data for OTC Markets Group shows that up to 90% of the trading volume comes from short selling on some days. If we did not carefully track our bi-weekly Short Interest, we could easily be led to believe that short selling is rampant in our stock.

Seeing the above data can be alarming for public companies and their investors, until they understand the inner workings of how dealer markets function and broker trades are reported—which render the data virtually meaningless.

Since this data also comes from FINRA, what gives? The daily short selling volume is misleading because market makers and principal trading firms report a large number of trades as short sales in positions that they quickly cover. For market makers with a customer order to sell, they will temporarily sell short (which gets published to the tape as a media transaction for public dissemination) and then immediately buy from their customer in a non-media transaction that is not publicly disseminated to avoid double counting share volumes. SEC guidance also mandates that almost all principal trading firms that provide liquidity at multiple price levels, or arbitrage international securities, must mark orders they enter as short, even though those firms might also have strategies that tend to flatten by end of day. Since the trade reporting process for market makers and principal trades makes the Daily Short Volume easily misleading, we do not display it on www.otcmarkets.com.

Making daily short reporting data easily-digestible and relevant is not hard. On the contrary, it should be easy to aggregate all of the short selling that is reported as agency trades, as well as all of the net sum of buying and selling by each market maker and principal trading firm. This would paint a clear picture for investors of overall daily short selling activity. Fixing the misleading daily short selling data would bring greater transparency and trust to the market.

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The author of this blog is the President, CEO and Director of OTC Markets Group. He was the Chairman of FINRA’s Market Regulation Committee so I believe he knows what he’s talking about. Here’s his resume.

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R. Cromwell Coulson - President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of OTC Markets Group (OTCQX:OTCM) R. Cromwell Coulson is President, CEO and a Director of OTC Markets Group, responsible for the company’s overall growth and strategic direction. Cromwell is a strong advocate of improving access to capital for small companies, supporting a diverse ecosystem of broker-dealers, and empowering investors with information. He has testified before Congress and spoken on these and other issues at numerous industry conferences. Cromwell is a former Chair (2017-2018) of the FINRA Market Regulation Committee that advises FINRA on rulemaking and trading issues. Prior to OTC Markets, Cromwell was an institutional trader and portfolio manager at Carr Securities Corporation. He holds an OPM from Harvard Business School and received his BBA from Southern Methodist University.

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https://blog.otcmarkets.com/2018/11/13/unders...-activity/