Centrus Energy Corp (LEU)

[Toxic Avenger]

No, there are not many naked short positions. They exist only for a short period until a market maker covers them.
The 13 million shares is before the 25:1 reverse split, so it's really 260k short shares. Still a large short position.

Ignore the "daily short volume". Those are positions created by market makers who see the price falling and sell first, then buy later. It's usually seconds later, but it gets reported as a short sale and even after it's covered, it remains counted by the FINRA methodology.

So in a rapidly moving stock like USU with program trading, daily short volume can be a major portion of the trading volume. In fact, if you look at ANY stock on the shortanalytics site, (GOOG, AAPL) you'll see 30-50% "short" every day. So aside from convincing a few newbies that their worthless OTC penny stock is being massively "naked shorted", that data is useless.

Keep in mind that institutions and hedge funds are the majority holders AND shorters in exchange traded stocks like USEC. There's no "screw the shorts" mentality. There's an "I'm trying to maximize my gains" mentality. Once again, "let's get the shorts / market makers" is only something you hear when someone's trying to pump a stock up. For real traders, shorting is as legitimate a strategy as buying, it's just a belief the price will fall, not rise. And shorting is virtually impossible, or prohibitively expensive on OTC stocks.