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I was too late to profit from the Gamestop short squeeze at end of January. However I took interest and kept an eye on some statistics for the Gamestop stocks:

In January, the short percent of float was as high as 140% (See: How can GameStop be short 140% of float?)

All week the stock price was around $50 and until 10th of February the shorts were still as high as 80% of float.

Today, according to https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/GME/short-interest/ the shorts are only 40% of float.

How can the shorts be suddenly only half of what they were before without the stock price changing much?

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  • Feel free to edit the question as you like. I don't think I can be any clearer and I'm only learning about stocks, so I won't be able to give more specifics.
    – NoAnswer
    Feb 12, 2021 at 18:30
  • One possible answer could be: Don't trust marketbeat for info, because it rarely updates and if it does you get strange changes and are left wondering why. However this is speculative from my side. Can anyone comment?
    – NoAnswer
    Feb 12, 2021 at 18:32

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It's hard to know what the facts are because at web sites like Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, MarketBeat, et al, many of the stats that they provide do not match up. In addition, short interest data is reported twice a month as seen in your link.

It would be helpful if you could dig up a list of the daily short interest over the past 3 weeks. Then, you could compare its daily change with share price change.

The short answer is that the short interest declines when the shorts cover their positions and when a stock like GME drops from $500 to $50, that's the likely result.

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  • Well, I guess the short sellers have covered their positions over time (so that the stock price didn't rise) and the stats weren't updated accordingly. A definitive answer (or sources for this presumption) would've been nicer but I don't see where to get those.
    – NoAnswer
    Feb 13, 2021 at 22:04
  • The normal expectation is that if there's a lot of shorting, price will fall. But that isn't necessarily true if there's a lot of offsetting buy volume. While I don't know what GME's short interest was before the short squeeze began, it was quite high. And despite that, GME's price was diddling around in the high teens for over a month before redditors put the wood to it.
    – Bob Baerker
    Feb 14, 2021 at 14:43

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