What is the source of your claim that mm's may only short naked when there are no shares available? Here is a section of the SEC's Regulation SHO, and I don't see that here, nor am I aware of a law, regulation, or document that says only when no shares available.

I think I agree and disagree. :) I suspect you are correct that "it is extremely rare for no shares to be available," but they don't just need shares available, they need profitable shares available, otherwise it seems like they'd go bankrupt in a hurry.

I don't know the SEC's definition of "bona fide" market making, but it would seem reasonable to me that rules would not require a market maker to act unprofitably.

They definitely trade for their own account, as that is the account they use to "make" a market by working the spread when asks and bids would otherwise not meet.

The #1 reason why AVXL is so volatile: Small Float

"A stock with a small float will generally be more volatile than a stock with a large float. This is because, with fewer shares available, it may be harder to find a buyer or seller. This results in larger spreads and often lower volume." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/floating-stock.asp

And this effect is magnified when longs keep shares off the market for months or years at a time.

"Authorized" shares are the total number of shares the company may issue.
"Outstanding" shares are the shares already issued.
"Restricted" shares are issued shares that can't legally be traded for a while, typically held by company managers.
"Float" shares are calculated as Outstanding - Restricted shares. This is the float that is reported publicly.

However, there can be many other shares that are held off the market by long investors, and each share held by longs effectively reduces the true float below what can be calcualted from publicly available data.

I and others bought shares by the thousands and tens of thousands back in early 2015, when the PPS was at its lowest. Many others have bought and held significant numbers of shares since then. Based on private communications among many longs, the total number of shares we hold is in the millions, and a substantial percentage of the offical float. Many of us have no plans to sell them for a long, long time, and perhaps never, if Anavex begins paying dividends someday, as we expect.

So we longs directly contribute to volatility.

Have you noticed that AVXL has become even more volatile lately?

Naked short selling can be legal according to the SEC's Regulation SHO:

Perhaps I did not explain it well enough. If a Market-Maker has naked shorts positions open at the time their short positions are reported for the FINRA-required semimonthly short report, they should be included in the short report.

What can force them to hold naked positions open longer than they like is not legal requirements, but profit-seeking and a shortage of shares available to close profitably.

As for avoiding the short report, why would they try? Why would they care? I don't see any incentive for them to care one way or the other, as I expect their only concerns are to "make a market" as they are required to do, and to do so as profitably as possible.

I think you are mistaken based on the citations I just provided. (Which I added to, perhaps while you were posting your reply.)

Market-makers apparently want to close naked short positions quickly, and usually do so in sub-second time, but they are not required to close quickly or even in the same day, and when there is a scarcity of shares available, they may not be able to. They may be forced to hold some naked positions open overnight, in which case they would contribute to the twice-monthly short report, if they were open during a reporting deadline. That was the basis of the hypothesis I presented here: https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164599831

"Each FINRA member firm is required to report its 'total' short interest positions in all customer and proprietary accounts in Nasdaq-listed securities twice a month. These reports are used to calculate short interest in Nasdaq stocks." https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/short-interest-report

"FINRA requires firms to report short interest positions in all customer and proprietary accounts in all equity securities twice a month. All short interest positions must be reported by 6 p.m. Eastern Time on the second business day after the reporting settlement date designated by FINRA." https://www.finra.org/filing-reporting/regulatory-filing-systems/short-interest

This appears to cover all short positions, whether they are backed by borrowed shares or not. Thus the twice-monthly short report should include any naked short positions held overnight by market-makers.

This document, https://www.sec.gov/dera/reportspubs/special-studies/short-sale-position-and-transaction-reporting.pdf, shows that the markets overall have far more data on shorting activity than what is reported publicly twice a month.

McMagyar, the SLB rates are updated multiple times a day, compared to twice a month for the report that shows ~7M shares short, and I believe the Stock-Loan-Borrow rate is a far more accurate indicator of short demand than the twice-monthly short report.

Why are the two out of sync on AVXL? I've wondered that for a while, and finally came up with a hypothesis which I posted here:

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164599831

Sorry I did not notice your reply until now.

If the show has been getting frequent callers telling the call-taker they want to ask about Anavex, and have been turned down until now, Cramer could have simply told the call-taker to let the next Anavex caller through, which happened to be yesterday.

Miguel could be legit or a stooge, or Cramer et al. could simply have processes where they routinely try to take advantage of whatever Cramer says on-air.

Cramer is on video admitting to criminal offenses to profit from investments, so any manipulation by him and his partners/friends should not be a surprise to anyone.

I am a candidate for Aduhelm because I have MCI. I would not take that toxic drug if they paid me $54K to take it.

On the brighter side in my case, when I was first diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment, I was told there was a 50% chance I would progress to Alzheimer's, a 25% I would stabilize, and a 25% I would improve. On my last visit, my neurologist said it has been so long without progressing to Alzheimer's that I probably never will.

I can't help but wonder if my comprehensive health regimen improved my odds, and maybe made the difference between getting worse or stabilizing. I know I'm not going to change what I've been doing except to start taking Anavex 2-73 as soon as possible.

It has been explained. That was part of the historic, gigantic short squeeze across all stocks held short by the major investment institutions with very large short positions, triggered by the army of WallStreetBets retail investors. The big corporate heavily-leveraged shorts lost billions in a matter of weeks, and it appears they have not yet recovered their capital or their nerve.

They were not immediately squeezed on all their short bets, such as AVXL, but huge margin calls on some stocks forced them to liquidate many of their other assets, which created the secondary squeezes such as the one you cited with AVXL in early February.

AVXL has not had any major shorting since that event, based on the Stock-Loan-Borrow (SLB) interest rates.

AVXL Top 1% in direction on Barchart:

https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/AVXL/opinion

If we're calling shots, I say we'll hit $200/share before the end of the year.

:)

Based on the Stock-Loan-Borrow (SLB) rates, there is no significant shorting of Anavex, Biogen, or Cassava.

Annovis had a significant increase in late May from near zero to about 60%, related to the huge spike in PPS on May 21st, but it has been trending down ever since to around 12% now.

NTRP spun off its assets to Neurotrope Bioscience (NBI) traded on OTC.

If I understand correctly, as of last December, they exist as Synaptogenix, Inc. (SNPX), although I don't know how that transition occurred. They just did a reverse split and (re)uplisted to NASDAQ, and it has mostly the same corporate leaders as it's had for years.

Their main drug candidate, Bryostatin-1, was originally investigated as an anti-cancer agent, then as an anti-HIV agent, and then against many CNS diseases.

Recent progress in their trials appears to be extremely slow.

Wow. Anavex sailed on with the Rett trial through the pandemic because Dr. Missling cared enough about the needs of the patients' families to ask them for their input on how to structure the trials in ways that would not be too hard for them to participate!

Thus, they introduced remote assessments via Zoom, and when the pandemic hit, our trial was unaffected by lockdowns.

Thanks for sharing this video, TTT!

"It's the exercising of options that can be taxable."

I wrote that exercising of employee stock options is a taxable event, so we are in agreement on that point.

I further agree that an exercise of employee stock options is not inherently good or bad, or a reflection of anything about the underlying company condition.

You wrote, "Option holders tend to exercise when they intend to sell," but they also tend to exercise when if they resign or are terminated, because the option will cease to exist after their employment ends.

So if our CFO is being replaced with someone more experienced, I think that is very likely why she is exercising her options, and I suspect that like most folks who exercise them for any reason, she had to sell some to cover the tax liability.

When an employee exercises their stock options, it is a taxable event. It is very common for people to have to sell some of those shares in order to be able to pay the taxes.

I think Rubyred77 is asking how many specific shares have been traded in a day. E.g. If I buy 1,000 shares at open, sell them an hour later, then the account that bought shares from me sells them, the exchange will report a volume of 3,000 shares traded, but it was only 1,000 shares that were traded 3 times.

If this is a correct understanding of the question, I would like to know that too, but I don't know of any way to determine an accurate and precise number.

Institutional holdings are currently 25.92%. I don't know of a way to determine how many specific shares have been traded in a day, just the ubiquitously reported aggregate number of shares traded without regard to which shares.

Traders buy and sell. Longs buy and hold. “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” Warren Buffett

Please add me to the millionaire's list, for which I qualified well before today.

And I think the lowest price was about 60 cents (15 cents prior to 4-1 reverse split). The lowest price of my shares was 16.1 cents which became 64.4 cents after the reverse split.

AVXL Home Run; Strikeout Possibility is GONE

Congratulations to all longs. We needed great patience to get to today, with all that time facing the possibility our AVXL investment could become worthless. That fear is gone. That is over.

We'll still hold, but now it's to happily watch the value go higher and higher over the months and years to come.

Thanks to everyone here and on the old Yahoo board who have provided exceptionally high quality analysis over the years, and...

Well done, LOOOOONGS!

Thanks for posting, seventhwave. The more researchers learn about the intricate workings of Alzheimer's, the better.

As boi568 points out, MMs could use options to mitigate risk when/if they are forced to hold short trades open longer than they like.

Hypothesis: Why the twice-monthly short report data doesn't correlate with the Stock-Loan-Borrow (SLB) interest rates for shorting stocks.

My assertion of a lack of correlation is just based on my general impression, not a mathematical study. I have suspected non-correlation a long time, and it has always puzzled me. I have finally come up with what I think might be a plausible explanation.

It has been my understanding that Market Makers (MM) open and close the vast majority of intra-day short sales, and that for the vast majority of their short sells, they buy-to-close within milliseconds. That may be true across all stocks in general, but "vast majority" is not 100%. Might there be circumstances where MMs can't buy-to-close quickly? That appears to be the case:

New Standard for FDA Approval: Full Enrollment [eom]

This could have huge implications for Anavex's ability to get FDA approval, it seems to me. It magnifies the leniency of the FDA's Biogen approval.

Other bios down today include: Abbott, AbbVie, Amgen, Baxter, Bayer, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly, Gilead, Jazz Pharma,
J&J, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and Roche

Bud, I am retired and no longer have an IRA. I have not used a smartphone since I had encephalitis, so I use the desktop version of IB's Trader Workstation.

IB has a wide variety of data feeds, some free, most for fee. However, the fees are very low IMO, e.g. $1-3/month. I think they only pass on charges from the data vendors, without a markup.

They also have a very wide range of methods for defining or automating trades, and I don't think you'll find cheaper trading fees or margin rates anywhere else. Some of the methods for posting a bid or ask helps market makers, which pay a little to encourage those types, you can actually earn a tiny amount on trades instead of paying.

That's what I was referring to when I wrote that the overnight shorting data is only updated every two weeks. That makes it worthless for detecting a Short & Distort attack like AVXL suffered before.

The SLB rate, on the other hand, is updated multiple times a day, and showed a clear and dramatic spike to way over 100% interest during the S&D attack that was gone before the next twice-a-month short report.

I will be happy to, HMB. I will post any significant change here immediately, assuming my cognitive ability hasn't fallen off a cliff again.

Having MCI and having had a bout of encephalitis, I feel compelled to add the caveat.

If we're talking about potential big news, I think the biggest would be a PR saying Anavex has formally applied for FDA Priority Review, Breakthrough Therapy, Accelerated Approval, or Fast Track, or an equivalent from another country.

The vast majority of short selling is by market-makers and the vast majority of those short transactions are matched with buy-to-close transactions within milliseconds.

Overnight shorting is only reported twice per month.

The best signal I am aware of for long-term shorting pressure on a stock is Interactive Brokers' Stock-Loan-Borrow (SLB) rate -- the interest rate they charge on borrowed shares. The SLB rates are at historic lows for AVXL, indicating there is no large-scale shorting, either individually or in the aggregate.

For a long time, I have alternated making my AVXL shares between available for lending and not available. When available, and there is demand, IB will lend out my shares, charge interest to the borrower, and pay me half the interest. I can see daily reports on how many of my shares they have lent. I have been leaving it as available ever since January as an extra way to monitor short demand. Since early February, almost none of my shares have been borrowed. The big shorts have apparently not recovered their capital or nerve from their meltdown caused by WallStreetBets.

Falconer, I'm having trouble understanding your reply.

Is my previous understanding of the quote in the PR correct that if someone takes Anavex 2-73, the result will be that the person gains more sigma-1 receptors, as well as having their sigma-1 receptors activated?

A273 increases sigma-1 receptors, in addition to activating them! People with Alzheimer's lose sigma-1 receptors as they age. This sounds to me like yet another very positive mechanism of action.

"ANAVEX®2-73 treatment resulted in increases in the mRNA expression of SIGMAR1, the gene coding for the receptor targeted by ANAVEX®2-73, which correlated with clinical efficacy as measured by both primary efficacy endpoints (ITT population), namely RSBQ (p = 0.035) and CGI-I (p = 0.029)."

Most of the longs recognize that AVXL is either a home run or a strikeout. We are not blind to the downside, but we're excited because the price/share has doubled in about one month, has just broken the all time high close, and seems poised to possibly double again (or better, or much better) if the upcoming data is good. Thanks for your concern, but we're doing fine.

There will always be peaks and valleys in stock prices, and there will always be some who try to pick the tops and sell short. That's normal, as opposed to a Short & Distort fraud.

AVXL will have plenty of big price swings in its future, but I think the vast majority of shorts, institutional and retail, and very skittish these days.

I suspect that without a huge, expensive, risky effort to push AVXL drops below most stop-loss orders on level 3, small shorts aren't likely to consider closing their short positions every time the ticker ticks up again.