Nothing like some detective work :) It would be great to get my hands on an actual daily chart of short interest. Then I could overlay that with the spikes in naked shorts and share price.
I'm trained as a researcher (not in stocks/finance) and so my first response to information is "What is it telling us? What is it not telling us?"
We don't have the actual daily short interest numbers. That restricts what it can tell us.
We do have the spike in naked shorts, the daily plot of shares on loan, the semi-monthly numbers for short interest and the closing prices. Also, May 18th was the date of the announcement of the contract signing of the Jasper Explorer.
I can also get a reasonable estimate of the difference between shares on loan and short interest by measuring the difference between the point where the short interest line meets the shares on loan plot and the top of the line, and then checking that against the scale on the left of the graph.
May 13th: Slightly above 3M
May 31st: Around 4.5M
I looked at the dates of the major spike in May. It started on the 16th and lasted through the 20th. The number of shares on loan appears to start dropping around the 18th.
Closing price for those dates are:
May 16 3.32
May 17 3.18
May 18 3.96
May 19 3.83
May 20 4.02
The price dipped slightly on Monday May 23, then climbed to 4.75 by Monday May 31
Did someone pull their shares on loan to create a price spike? Or was this a concerted effort to buffer the effect?
Damn, I didn't keep the file I constructed that overlay with. I know better than not to save work like that. Oh well, I can reconstruct it if I have some time and overlay share price and the spike naked shorts.
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