DEAD STOCK TRADING!

[Slojab]

What you're missing is that there are two different things involved in your question but only one in the example given.

Whether a trade is considered a "buy" or a "sell" for the purpose of classifying it as one or the other depends on whether the trade went off at the bid or the ask. That's what you're asking about. Yes, there has to be equal numbers of buys and sells from a technical standpoint but the number of buys and sell that get classified as one or the other can be 100% of one or the other. This is done to tell the strength/weakness of the trading.

Finra's numbers have nothing whatsoever to do with this. Finra simply accounts for the intraday trading of the MMs and what they have to do in order to facilitate orderly trading, which is what the example shows.

Here's a really thorough post someone recently put up about shorting.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=137511756