Assuming the most possible covering over the last three sessions (including and accounting for the excess shorting each day since then) I had figured the short position size at about ~40M shares so my estimation was that about 40M shares needed to cover today. The numbers for today were :
Monday - 44% - 20130211|RFMK|28245782|0|64453971|O
so excluding the volume today made up of new short sales (~28M), if we assume that 100% of the rest of the volume was to cover existing shorts needing to buy to cover then roughly 36M shares intraday were available for covering. If indeed ~36M shares were covered today then that just about accounts for all of the covering that needed to take place (an extra ~4M covers needed but its within the range so not a concern), HOWEVER, please note that, in assuming all along the way over the three or four days we have been observing, we were accounting for 100% of the volume left over from fresh daily shorts as the volume accounting for the covering which needed to happen each day from the past existing shorts. Folks can draw their own conclusions from this raw data but the conclusion I come to is that there is only one of two ways to interpret this "action" and they are mutually exclusive; you can believe one or the other but not both or any other theory. It may be the case indeed that all the daily shorts are properly getting covered but that would also mean that ALL the volume we are seeing is totally 100% phony and fake by MMs and market play'as. Or it may be the case that the volume is a mix of retail traders, investors selling/accumulating, flippers flipping, MMs doing their thing to "provide liquidity", etc, all fair and balanced but that would also mean that most of the daily short sales are NOT getting properly covered over time. If we adhere to the first conclusion then it means that MMs and firms are properly following regulations and the T+3 settlement window is allowing brokers to properly provide their clients with liquidity in the moment on any given day and then properly going out into the market and buying those shares to cover their positions and deliver shares to the client however then how do we make sense of all the excess volume? How is it that a few hundred thousand shares are shorted and then tens of millions of shares are shorted and covered each day from then on, and for all time (continuously)? One would expect that if client A bought X shares we would see a trade in the market for X shares and then T+3 days later or within that time another trade for X shares, very simple. But the playa's seem to be making it all much more complex than that and therein lies the concern for market participants and retail investors. Why if so few real shares by retail are getting traded must those who "provide liquidity" in this stock need to "trade" tens of millions of shares every other day just to execute a trade of maybe a few hundred thousand shares?! Hmmmm, perhaps when a poor poker player sits down with the big guns and goes all in for $5, the sharks holding $160,080,110,000.... dollars decide to just all call and go all in themselves even if holding seven deuce off-suit because... why not? Especially if all the sharks are all in collusion, it makes sense to just keep forcing the little guy to go all in on every hand because eventually, even if he is doubling up every time, the odds will catch up and after a few hands the little fish fry will lose it all. Once the retail investor fish fry learn the real business of the market manipulators, they know how they make money on a daily basis and the daily action, PPS moves and the painted "chart" are more easily understood.
Very fun it is to engage in some real-time testing of various theories, ehhh??!!! 
THOUGHTS?
You must unlearn what you have learned. The dark side clouds everything.
$RFMK
