Not sure what you know about shorting, and I am no expert though I have shorted shares in the past, but that's simply a reporting of the publicly available volume of shorted shares available through the Over the Counter (OTC) Markets Group, aka OTCQX International. OTCQX International is a U.S. market for companies already listed on a qualified international stock exchange (as LIHTF is in Canada on the CSE), which allows global companies to better access U.S. investors. It's actually The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a U.S. regulatory body charged with governing stock market business, that tracks and reports shorted stock amongst many other things.
The rise of 7.82% in shorted shares is relatively minor. The volume of 663k shares is much smaller than I anticipated; I believe less than 1% of publicly available shares. This is generally good news as it indicates investors with shorting interest are relatively scarce with LIHTF. Hard to believe those investors could control the market for LIHTF with that few shares, though it's possible without an appropriate volume of long buyers in the market.
The reporting that it would take 2 days for shorting investors to recover their shorted shares is also quite brief, as many heavily shorted stocks would require weeks for short investors to recover the stocks they have shorted (which leads to the legendary "short squeeze"). Other companies are legendary for the volume of short shares (AMD and Alibaba as examples), but they are so heavily traded it wouldn't take long for shorts to get rid of their shares (2 to 5 days for AMD and Alibaba). Snap has about 18% of their stock shorted (140M shares) that would take more than two weeks to liquidate, but short investors are convinced the stock won't go up significantly soon so they're not worried.
Remains to be seen how these Liht short investors influence the company stock over the long term. It would seem to indicate that short investors won't be able to stand in the way of a large volume of buyers driving up the price, but also that shorts will not be caught in a massive short squeeze that would drive up the price even further in a panic.
Whew, I blabbed on long enough for something I don't know a ton about, so maybe someone else can provide even more clarity on the specifics of this reporting.
