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Short Interest

FINRA bi-monthly count of shares sold short and not yet covered

Short interest is the count of shares sold short and not yet covered, reported to FINRA on a bi-monthly cadence. It is most useful as a percentage of public float (SI %-of-float) rather than as an absolute share count.

In short
  • FINRA short-interest reports settle bi-monthly with a publication lag of about 10 business days from the report date.
  • SI %-of-float of 20%+ is high. 10-20% is meaningfully crowded. Below 5% is sparsely shorted.
  • Short interest is a count of open positions, not a forecast. High SI is a setup attribute, not a directional call.
How its calculated

How is Short Interest calculated?

SI_pct_float = total_shares_sold_short / public_float

Public float = shares_outstanding - insider_holdings - restricted_shares
FINRA total_shares_sold_short = aggregated open short positions across all member firms

The numerator is reported by FINRA member firms on a bi-monthly cadence. The denominator (public float) comes from issuer disclosures and changes only on insider transactions or share-issuance events. The %-of-float metric is the standard cross-name comparison; raw share counts are not comparable across companies.

What traders use it for

What do traders use Short Interest for?

  • Identifying crowded short positioning. SI %-of-float is the cleanest single number for "how loaded is the short side."
  • Pairing with borrow fee and utilization to assess hard-to-borrow regimes. High SI plus high fee plus high utilization is the classic squeeze setup.
  • Quarterly thesis-building. SI publishes too slowly for live trading but gives a cross-section of which names institutional shorts have been adding to.
Worked example

Worked example

Worked example: $GME
Short interest on $GME at a stress moment

Suppose the FINRA bi-monthly short-interest report dated 2026-04-15 (published 2026-04-30) prints GME total short interest of 60.0M shares. GME public float at that report date is 280M shares (shares outstanding 305M minus insider 25M). SI %-of-float = 60.0 / 280 = 21.4%. Anything above 20% qualifies as heavily shorted in the cross-section of US-listed equities. As of report date 2026-04-15.

Live data: /stock/GME.

Common pitfalls

What are common pitfalls of Short Interest?

  • Roughly 10-business-day publication lag means SI is always at least a week stale. The borrow-fee and utilization feeds are daily; do not pin a same-day thesis on a two-week-old SI number.
  • SI %-of-float depends on the float definition. Some platforms use total shares outstanding; Tapeboard uses public float (excludes insider and restricted shares). The two can differ materially on closely-held names.
  • Synthetic short positions (options-replicated) are not in the FINRA count. A name with low SI but heavy put open interest can be effectively shorted in size without showing in the SI report.
  • New IPOs have unstable SI for the first reports because the borrow market has not stabilized. Treat the first 60-90 days of SI on an IPO with caution.
Where it appears on Tapeboard

Where this metric appears on Tapeboard

Short interest renders on every `/stock/{T}` page (absolute and %-of-float) and on the /short-squeeze-stocks landing. In the squeeze score (setup v6) short interest is the eligibility gate (>= 15% of float), not a weighted input.

Tapeboard surfaces this metric as a first-class screening filter. See the comparison pages at all Bloomberg alternatives for how Tapeboard's short interest surface compares against Koyfin, Finviz, TradingView, and Unusual Whales.

Related TERMS

Related terms

  • Utilization (Lending): Daily-published, sourced from broker-dealer stock-loan books.
  • Days To Cover: Higher DTC means a slower unwind. Above 5 days is a meaningful liquidity constraint on short covering; above 10 is severe.
  • Failures-To-Deliver (FTD): Bi-monthly SEC dataset, lag of about two weeks. Counts unsettled share volume per ticker per day.
  • Squeeze Score: Gate: short interest >= 15% of float (latest published FINRA settlement, split-checked). Listed common stock, price >= $1, liquid, market cap >= $25M.
Primary sources

Primary sources cited

See it live

See it live

Every ticker page prints short interest twice: the absolute share count and the percentage of float, with the as-of settlement date. The squeeze landing ranks the heavily shorted set daily.

Page review

Methodology last reviewed 2026-05-04 by Marcus Reilly, Editor at Tapeboard. Every claim on this page has a row in the citation registry. Glossary terms reverify on the Jan 15 / Apr 15 / Jul 15 / Oct 15 cron and any time the underlying primary-source publishes a methodology change. See methodology for the full fact-check process and corrections for the public correction log.

Disclaimer. This page is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing on Tapeboard is investment advice. See the full risk disclaimer.