Last week one astute forum contributor brought up the possibility of mapping ECU share price versus shorts. I have assembled the shorting data now in a spread sheet, but my ECU data has some problems. First, I collected the share price on Friday's close, versus the short data being published on the 15th and last days of the month. Second, during the period I shifted from ECU.T to ECUXF and that is affected by the Can/US exchange rate. Last, there are a few missing datum in my spread sheet. So in order to get a better handle on the data, I have to find ECU.T data for the 15th and end of month going back 18 months.
BUT! scanning the data shows the not so surprising effect of delta shorts vs delta share price.
One example is a 21% drop in ECUXF correlated to a 1,200,000 increase in shorts in Jan this year. A similar drop of 21% took place from May 15th to May 28 on a 350,000 share increase in shorts. Short covering does look to occur when the price is depressed. this will all be easier to analyze when I get the time to enter share price data for ECU.T that matches the report dates for shorts.
An early "eye ball" analysis shows that short position changes indeed are planned, consistent, large, and have the intuitive effect on share price. High share prices bring out large increases in shorts and are accompanied by decreases in sp.
If anyone knows of a source of share price for ECU.T for the 15th and 30th of the month going back 18 months, please let me know. If I can get one daily for the last 18 months I'll pry the data out.