Jiffy - total sympathy with your plight. There is a nonsensical point IMO here however. Let me explain.
" Shares on Loan are they simply IMHO, just a figure of available shares to be loaned?? since if as Ortex would have you believe 60m are now out on loan and are all being shorted, or are they?"
This I think makes no sense ... if you look at other stocks like Solgold or Hummingbird, or specifically UFO, it seems impossible that there would be 'no shares available for shorting'.
So i would suggest there is 60m pot of GGP sold short somewhere.
However, I wondered - is there some party - say Wyloo or another(?) - that is borrowing GGP shares as 'blocker positions' ... in order to block others from borrowing them to short?
That 60m short , if correct, that's still only 1.2% or thereabouts - so not a huge amount in the grand scheme. We see 4-6% on FTSE 100 companies - Ocado recently going from 6% plus to 4% corresponding with a price run from £4 to £10/ share and now back to £7
HOWEVER... what is questionable is the influence that 'price setting trades' can have on low volume days, especially on AIM, where market makers manually set price. And we have seen very low volume compared to recent 2020 to 2021/2 years - we'd often see 1000 trades per day and over 2500 on busy days - whereas today we see 200 to 300.
So the influence certain larger 250k+ trades can cumulatively have on price, if you know what you're doing, and your objective is to move price lower especially on AIM can and has been significant. The worked on the way up and down. Price is set at the margins. And price discovery on the initial way up was much more speculative and momentum inducing.
By comparison here are some Ortex prints for the stocks some form August 22 other from last week
Take Hummingbird resources... (when i looked into this last year) to compare to the short on GGP
Or UFO from the other day - zero shares available for loan (seems unlikely IMO)
Or Solgold a dramatic increase in shares on loan corresponding (like GGP) to a dramatic fall in price from, the mid 40s to the teens (or lower in GGP).
I think that some of this shorting is tactical / specialist PM managers like Sprott going after companies they perceive to be overpriced or weakened fundamentally. I know that Rick rule always suggested that Solgold in the 30s was very expensive.
I also concluded that Ortex whilst imperfect - just like Bloomberg Terminal or MorningStar - is imperfect, but probably more accurate that not
