Hightechjunkie........again your whole scenario is not accurate.
Using your same chart, I will explain why. First off no one I have run across uses Thomson for trading because the data is so unreliable.
Before reading my explanation, please go back to your pie chart link and click the link above the chart that says how to use pie chart and read their definitions.
Now the issues of your post. The 2 percent institutional, according to Thomson's own site, are either brokers trading for mutual funds etc, or brokers own in house accounts or MM accounts. So the 2 percent can easily be explained as MM activity.
Then you say the non I-Watch portion of the chart has to be off shore accounts or outside the US because its not retail and not Institutional. You also imply that it then must be hedge funds that are shorting the stock through those off shore accounts. Again read their definition of what NON I-WATCH stands for. As they clearly state, using their proprietary system is voluntary, and many brokers do not use it. They also state in that definition, that these are trades either retail or institutional that are not going through their system.
BTW isn't a hedge fund an institution?
But again thats immaterial. As your first link shows the shares shorted from 1 month to the next was 30,000 shares on a company with over 600 million shares. Not a significant amount. And even if a hedge fund is shorting shares, they still have to be reported. And the number of shares short is around 7 million or about 3 days worth of volume, so surely short selling is not what caused the decline of the past year from above .40 to todays levels.
Think about it. Do you really think that 30,000 new shares shorted in a month is really going to change the pps of a stock that has 600 million shares outstanding. 30,000 shares wouldn't have very much effect on the pps over a 30 day time period. As we have seen watching level II etc, sometimes it takes that many shares to move the pps up one hundredth of a penny, from say .0495 to .0496. And that swing occurs many times a day based on the volume of over 2 million shares a day. So the small number over a 30 day period will have virtually no impact on the pps.
If the number of short shares was growing month over month by many millions of shares, then I could accept your theory, but that just isnt the case here based on the facts that we have. And as I stated before, that short share number has not changed drastically over the past 12 months, so the amount of off shore or overseas shorting is very minimal, and a 1 percent short number on any stock is a very good number. The time to worry is when you see that number grow to 20 or 30 percent or higher. Thats a clear signal that a large percent of investors, whether they are retail or institutional, believe the pps is too high for the fundamentals and is coming down. Its also a good time for a short squeeze and a good run as well if the company is on the brink of some big news, so a high short number can work both for or against the investor. But a low short number really has not much of an impact on the daily pps. Heck even a company with only 40 million shares outstanding isnt going to be impacted much by 30,000 new short sales in a month. Especially if there are buyers for the stock. There activity will more then offset the short sales, and force those shorts to cover.
And that is the problem with NEOM. There are not enough new buyers coming in to take up the shares that are for sale. And as we saw by one posters post yesterday, the buyers that are there are trying to buy the stock on the MMs bid price, thus causing the mms to lower their bid. The one poster even said he had several orders in at increments below the mms bid. Now is the mm going to buy the stock at their bid price, and then sell it to this investor below that price for a loss? Thats why typically an investor buys on the ask not on the bid. The BID is the MMs price they are willing to pay for new shares to add to their inventory. The ASK is the price they will see their inventory shares to the investor for. The same holds true for the ask. If a retail investor has 10,000 shares of a stock, and the MMs bid is .05 and the mms ask is .06 and that shareholder puts in a sell on the ask price, they are going to wait in line until the mm sells all his shares at that price first. If however they see the mms bid is .05 and enter their order to sell at .05, they bump themselves to the front of the line and that MM bidding will grab their shares in seconds.
Also last week someone said they put in an order on the bid and it took 1 1/2 hours to execute, and they concluded their were no sellers. The sellers are not on the BID. There were plenty of sellers on the ASK and had that poster put their order in on the ask price I bet it would of been filled in seconds. That is a big misconception by a lot of investors, that if they place an order on the bid and it dont execute there are no sellers. They are trying to buy the stock out from under the MM who has that bid price, and of course that MM is going to take all the shares available at that price that they have orders for, before the retail investor will get their shares, so it typically will take a very long time to fill.
I copied and pasted the pop up window here with the definitions
""""""""""""""""After a broker/dealer executes a trade, it often reports the trade to Thomson's proprietary communications network. The Total Trade Volume Chart segments each trade as either Institutional or Retail, based on the broker reporting the trade.
Institutional - a trade reported by a major brokerage firm which typically trades on behalf of major mutual funds/portfolio managers. While these firms also have retail branches, the amount of trades reported on behalf of institutional investors dwarfs the limited amount of retail trades that are reported.
Additionally, Institutional brokers often maintain internal house trading accounts as "market makers." When these firms report their trades it is impossible to determine whether the trades were executed on behalf of an institutional client or for the firm's own house trading accounts. While trading patterns for institutional clients and house accounts tend to differ, the fact that "Big Money" is behind the trades means that these investors/traders have the ability to move markets.
Retail - a trade reported by a broker that primarily executes on behalf of retail investors, such as Charles Schwab's Mayer Schweitzer.
Non I-Watch - this portion of the chart refers to trades not reported over Thomson's proprietary communications network. Broker participation is voluntary, so it is rare that all trading volume is accounted for. These trades can be related to either institutional or retail trading.
Compare today's activity to prior 30-day average - this comparison lets you know if today's activity, specifically the breakdown between Institutional and Retail, is "unusual" relative to the rolling 30-day average.
AI
