Solar Wind Energy Tower Inc. (fka SWET)

[Homebrew]

Difference between Short "Volume" & Short "Sales/Interest" (simplified version)

Short "Sales/Interest": The number of shares borrowed and sold "short", with the hope of buying back at a lower price. Not yet covered, ie, "Open" "interest" or "positions".

This is what people mean when discussing "shorts"

FINRA reports this twice per month here: http://otce.finra.org/ESI ...
You can look here too, but sometimes lags the FINRA site
http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/swet/short-sales
100 shares...zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Daily Short "Volume" REGSHO: OTCshortreport generally hypes this - Intraday volume Market Makers transactions when they temporarily short a stock for a couple of seconds or a minute to fill an order in a timely manner, then cover a couple minutes later. Meaningless number because it's just the first leg of a transaction reported of filling orders.

"Volume" Example: 1,000,000 buy order comes in. MM doesn't have 1,000,000 handy to fill the order, so quickly shorts 1,000,000, fills the order for the customer rather than keep them waiting. Then after taking a sip of coffee, covers the temporary short.

Now, lets say that happens 10 times today, for a total of 10,000,000 shares, short "Volume" is 10,000,000, but at EOD, it doesn't result in any short "positions" or "interest" because they were all covered right away. That number was just the result of MMs filling orders.

The next day, someone sees the 10,000,000 short "volume" and talks about 10 MILLION SHORTS YESTERDAY, 80% SHORTS !!.....

Using REGSHO (otcshortreport's favorite) numbers is like going to the bank,
depositing $100,
withdrawing $100,
Depositing $100,
withdrawing $100..... repeating 10 times, then saying "I deposited $1000 in the bank today", when the account is actually $0

For bonus LOLZ, there's the "Institutional off-shore naked shorting hedge funds". They get the blame when all else fails.