Short answer: no one knows what's going to happen on a day to day basis. Could be a massive squeeze any second now, or... not. It's pointless to try and predict when.
Long answer:
82% aggregate shorts opened on the day means that at most they shorted 82% of the daily volume but at the very least they shorted 32% of that reported volume. Key word being reported, the numbers are provided to FINRA by "media" (their words, not mine) and a single share could have several legs of a trade, not all of them reported. Also those are aggregate shares, technically could be retail shorts but also include MM's being temporarily short to make a market. A lot of those shares could already have been covered. The upshot is you can't bank on the numbers for anything other than a vague general trend. Track it over days and weeks and the picture becomes less fuzzy. Some (maybe most) of the shorting going on is MM's making the market, they identify a buyer but don't have the inventory so they sell air shares. They have to buy them for real at some point to balance the books, either from us into the float lock concept at a high price or from flippers at not such a high price. As to what do they MM's expect to do? You got me, I have no idea. I think what they'd like to do is cover at the lowest price possible and I imagine they will try to do it in a way that doesn't make us all instant millionaires. We of course want the cover to be a volume stampede to increase our return. Some here don't believe there is a massive naked short position (which is NOT what is explicitly reported in the FINRA numbers per se), they will have other explanations for the action and if this was not a float lockdown a lot of their arguments would make sense. I maintain that the float is locked up and that most of the FINRA reported numbers do indicate naked shorting in this specific stock since they won't be able to finish the legs of many of the transactions when there are no real shares available.
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