The following is my theory as to why there are so many shares available for shorting at Interactive Brokers. And by the way, given how the share price for ERHE has slid over the years, whoever was shorting made a killing any way we slice it or dice it.
And there's definitely been shorting at Interactive Brokers since it used to be only 100 or 90 thousand available shares to short and now there's 10x that amount. None of this is reflected in the bimonthly Finra data, because it is my belief that the FINRA data is about naked shorts put forth by market makers and not general investor clients at Interactive Brokers.
I strongly suspect that the "investor" somewhere on the internet who disparages ERHE on a daily basis was shorting the stock and going long HDY. That investor showed up at ERHE's AGM and had to present proof that he invested at least one share, which he probably had just to get into the AGM and find ways to disparage the company for his position. ERHE's copy of this evidence should show him to be a customer at Interactive Brokers since that's the only online broker that I'm aware of that allows shorting of OTC stocks.
I don't buy the theory that this "investor" somewhere on the internet was disparaging ERHE to pick up cheap shares since this investor somewhere on the internet never said a disparaging word on HDY and was presumably long HDY. **NOTE**, we talk about HDY often on this board as it is comparable to ERHE.
I strongly believe that he was entering into a pairs trading position whereby he was long HDY but short ERHE. Now that this investor somewhere on the internet appears to be gone from the internet, we have 10x as many shares available for shorting.
I also don't think that if this were a years long grudge this investor would suddenly stop disparaging now...the company is not dead and there's much that can be disparaged if one were so inclined.
I think this investor stopped because he took such a licking on HDY's plunge that his pairs trade could no longer be viable. He couldn't use his HDY position as collateral for his short positions on ERHE anymore. So he covered. The proof is in the number of shares now available to short at Interactive Brokers.
Someone covered over the last week or two.
None of these figures show up on FINRA data at all.
Krombacher
