RE: Long and gone
Not all shorts are created equal.
First, large pharmaceutical companies that stand to lose a great deal if NWBO is successful could pay people to post negatively about the stock and to drive down the share price. Why? Because the lower the share price the harder to get financing, the more diluted the stock the less profit there is to be made by investors, and poor stock performance is an easy thing to point to as to why the company will fail or is mismanaged.
These shorts win by delaying results, by putting pressure on the company (financial, legal, etc.), by lowering the share price enough that any buy out is at a discounted rate, or by killing the company entirely. They do not necessarily hold any long-term position in the company's stock, neither holding shares nor holding a short position for long. They can manipulate the stock price with small, timed trades.
Second, there are companies and funds that make their money by shorting stocks. They look for companies with a certain profile and attack their stock. It does not matter if results are imminent. Results have seemingly been imminent for years. Again, they can manipulate the price with relatively small, timed trades to cause people to buy up while they unload shares, and to panic sell when they want to get the shares back. Alternately, they can do man-in-the-middle attacks by simultaneously buying and selling the stock, intercepting a buy order and filling it at a high price while simultaneously hitting a lower sell price. So if you put in a Limit order to buy 10,000 shares at $1.05, they might hit a bunch of shares at $1.03-$1.04 and sell them to you at $1.05 because their computers and network equipment are faster than your broker's.
In the same way there are companies and funds that pump stocks. Last summer one of those groups, which advertise themselves as 'short busters' or similar, pumped NWBO up over $1. Again, they look at companies that meet a certain profile, buys a bunch of stock for cheap, tell their followers that they are going to bust the shorts, their followers buy in, causing the stock to rise, the company/fund sells at an inflated price and moves on to the next stock. Each stock goes up just like they said it would because people are told it will go up so they buy, causing the stock to rise. Nice self-fulfilling advertising.
I would seriously doubt that there are many people with large short positions in NWBO right now. It is possible but to me fairly unlikely.
