Stop the silly talk about shorting. mREITs are plummeting because interest rates are rising. There's nothing sinister going on. Actually the "plot" was in the holding DOWN of rates to ridiculously low levels for several years.
"my guess is that CYS has been shorted really really hard"
There are shorters in just about every stock, including this one. Big deal. No doubt all the the great growth stocks (WMT, MSFT) had tons of shorters.