What the shorts did in early August

FINRA's short interest report for the August 14 settlement date counts 54.26 billion shares sold short across 22,482 US-listed issues. Two weeks earlier it was 55.30 billion, and two weeks before that 56.71 billion. Shorts as a group have been trimming since mid-July.

The total is a mood. The names are where the information is.

The biggest cover of the period

Beyond Meat. Short interest fell from 130.5 million shares to 5.1 million, a 96 percent drop in two weeks. Whatever the shorts were waiting for, they stopped waiting. At 5.1 million shares short against average daily volume that clears the position in a little over two days, the crowd that defined this stock for years is gone.

Apple shorts covered 25.3 million shares, an 18 percent cut, leaving 116.3 million short. SpaceX-linked SPCX saw 23.4 million covered. Aurora Innovation shorts cut 20.6 million.

The biggest builds

Enbridge went the other way, and hard. Shares short rose by 38.6 million to 69.8 million, an increase of 124 percent in two weeks, and at the stock's average volume it would take 9.9 days of trading to cover. That is the most crowded short in the large-cap list by that measure. Stellantis shorts added 25.4 million, up 24 percent to 130.7 million, at 7.1 days to cover. Transocean added 14.5 million to 268.9 million, six days to cover.

The most shorted, by count

Plug Power, 290.9 million shares. Nvidia, 286.0 million. Transocean, 268.9 million. Grab, 237.7 million. Ondas, 230.5 million. Raw counts flatter big, liquid stocks: Nvidia's 286 million shares is about two and a half days of normal trading, so nobody is trapped in it. Ondas, at 2.7 days, is the same story. Plug's 291 million takes four days.

Two things the report cannot tell you

Foreign lines. Several of the largest positions by count are US over-the-counter tickers for foreign stocks: Xiaomi's US line shows 187.8 million shares short after an 80 million jump, and SenseTime's shows 260.6 million. Their US volume is close to zero, so days to cover is meaningless, and the short is almost certainly a hedge against the home-market listing, not a bet on the US ticker. We show them because they are in the file, and we flag the volume.

Percent of float. FINRA reports shares, not the float, so a percent-of-float figure needs a share count from elsewhere. Where a company's SEC cover page gives us shares outstanding, the stock page shows the ratio. Where it does not, the count stands alone.

Timing

This is the August 14 settlement, which FINRA published at the end of August. The next file, settled August 29, lands around the second week of September, and Short Watch shows the date it is due. Canadian names come from CIRO on a similar twice-monthly cadence.

[ADAM: your read]

A short position is a paid-for opinion. Enbridge shorts doubling down while the stock sits in the TSX's biggest names is a disagreement worth understanding before you take either side of it.

Opinion and personal record, not investment advice.