The Daily Short Volume Report is even more popular than the threshold list among short selling conspiracy buffs. FINRA began publishing it at the behest of the SEC in early 2010. At the time, some objections were raised by industry professionals. Jess Haberman, who’d once worked at FINRA, noted that actual short sales are not reported. Rather, “proprietary and market maker sell orders and trades will be marked short when the firm is actually long, not taking into account pending sell orders. At the end of the day, the firm may well end up flat, meaning that they have no position in the instrument. Accordingly, the marking of sell orders as short by market makers, block positioners, and broker dealers effecting riskless principal transactions may not always accurately reflect what has transpired, and publishing data derived from these transactions may not increase market transparency and bolster investor confidence.”
Working together, FINRA and the SEC had created a monster. They had provided companies and their short-obsessed investors with a resource even more seductive than the threshold list. Instead of a mere handful of issues with threshold failures to deliver, the daily short volume offered supposed “short sale” numbers for virtually every stock traded on the national exchanges and over-the-counter. Every day, hundreds of message board posters submit posts about attacks on their stocks by dangerous shorts. Sometimes, they add each day’s numbers to arrive at totals rising as high as trillions of shares. Protests that short interest is a running balance fall on deaf ears.
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