Questions

What the registers publish

What is a net short position?

A short position on a share, once everything the seller holds long on the same company has been deducted. It is a balance rather than a gross figure, and the regulators measure it as a percentage of issued share capital.

At what threshold does a position become public?

Under the European regime, at 0.5% of the capital, and again at each 0.1% step crossed. Below 0.5% the position is reported to the regulator but is not made public.

A position under the threshold therefore exists without appearing here, and the totals shown never represent all short selling on a company. That is the most important limit of this data.

Who files, and how quickly?

The holder of the position, never the company concerned nor the broker. The filing describes the situation at the close and reaches the regulator the next business day, with publication after that.

A figure shown here is therefore always at least a day old, and often more on the markets that publish weekly or monthly.

Do derivatives count towards the figure?

Yes. The calculation aggregates economic exposure, options, futures and swaps included, not only borrowed shares that were then sold. That is what makes it a balance rather than a count of shares.

Is a net short position the same as short interest?

No, and the two do not compare. American short interest is a number of shares sold short on a market, across all participants and naming nobody. A European net short position names a fund and is expressed as a percentage of the capital.

How QuiVad reads these registers

Why is a fund position its latest filing rather than the sum of its lines?

Because a fund refiles on every move, and several regulators leave the end date empty on all of those lines. Adding them up gave 3,242% of the capital sold short on a single company.

The current position of a fund on a share is its most recent filing, one line. It is the first thing to check when two sites disagree.

Why does your figure differ from another site?

Two possible causes, never a naive sum: a stale value kept while a more recent filing exists, and a line that appears in no regulator file at all.

The method that settles it is to decompose fund by fund instead of comparing totals: the gap then falls to the hundredth and can be named. The procedure, run against the official file itself, is on the sources page.

What does "to be checked" mean on the sources page?

That drift rules found something abnormal in the latest file of that market: a silent register, an impossible fall, a date frozen for too long.

The market concerned is then dropped from the moves of the day rather than announcing a mass exit that never happened. A tracker does not break loudly: it goes on publishing last month figures under today date.

Why are some lines discarded when reading?

Because they cannot be read with certainty. Sweden writes "<0.5" when a position falls back under the threshold: reading that as 0.5 would invent a position that is gone, so the line is refused.

Every source publishes how many lines it refused. A silent drop is how a tracker starts lying.

How often are the figures re-read?

Every register is read once a day, and any that did not answer is retried within the hour. A register that publishes weekly or monthly does not change between two reads for all that.

The date of the latest file of each market is shown as it stands on the sources page.

The markets followed

Which markets does QuiVad follow?

Every one that publishes these positions, in Europe and beyond: the European registers, the United Kingdom, and the large markets outside Europe that publish this information.

The current list, with the regulator of each market and the date of its latest file, is on the sources page.

Why does the United Kingdom no longer name the funds?

Because the FCA changed regime on 13 July 2026: it now publishes an aggregated total per company and no longer publishes holder names. The old named file stops at that date and serves as an archive.

British rows say so on screen rather than showing an empty fund.

Why is the United States in shares rather than in percent?

Because FINRA publishes a number of shares sold short and holds no register of what a company has issued. Working out a percentage would mean estimating the denominator elsewhere, which this site does not do.

The American ranking therefore reads in shares, inside its own market only, and is never mixed with European percentages.

Why are Japan and Australia here?

Because they are the large markets outside Europe that publish this information, and no other tracker shows them next to the European registers. They run their own regimes and are not under the European regulation.

Nothing on this site claims that every figure comes from the European regime, and the legal notice say so explicitly.

Can the ranking of one market be compared with another?

With care. A market that names funds and a market that publishes only an aggregated total per company are not measuring the same thing, and a market counting in shares compares to neither.

The rankings keep them apart for that reason rather than manufacturing a single figure that would look comparable without being so.

Using the site

How do I find the most shorted companies?

The home page opens on the market of its own domain and gives the world ranking underneath. The full ranking of each market starts from the countries page.

How do I follow a fund rather than a company?

The funds page lists every holder, with its number of open positions, the markets where it files and the date of its latest filing. The page of a fund gives all its positions and its history.

How do I see what moved?

The moves page gives the filings of the last thirty days, each one qualified: opening, increase, reduction or exit.

Only the markets whose register names the funds appear there: elsewhere, an aggregated total that moves does not say who moved.

How do I get warned when a position moves?

By an RSS feed, with no account to create and no address to hand over. There is one for all moves, one per company and one per fund, each declared in the head of the page it belongs to.

The subscription stays inside your own software: there is nothing to consent to and nothing that can leak.

How far back does the history go?

To 2010 for the oldest regimes, depending on when each regulator started publishing.

A company that is no longer sold short keeps its page and its full history. That is the part of this data the regulators themselves no longer serve.

Reusing the figures

May I reuse this data?

It comes from the official publications of the regulators and remains subject to the conditions each of them sets: some publish under an open licence that requires naming the source, others claim a right over their database.

The known licence of each register is given register by register on the sources page.

How do I reproduce your figures myself?

By downloading the regulator file, linked on the sources page, then decomposing company by company and fund by fund. The procedure is written there to be run again, and it is the file that is right.

Is there a machine address for finding a company?

Yes. /api/isins returns one line per declared company: its ISIN and the address of its page on this site. That is what lets another site point straight at the right page instead of guessing an address.

May I quote QuiVad?

Yes, with no permission to ask for. Quoting the regulator the figure comes from serves the reader more, since that is where the data can be checked.

The site

Is the site free?

Access is open today: no subscription, no reserved feature, no limit on how many companies or funds can be looked at, and no page hidden behind a sign-up.

What do you do with my data?

There is no advertising, no cookie and no consent banner. The single audience measurement used writes nothing on your machine, hands out no identifier and cannot follow you from one site to the next.

What is processed is set out on the privacy page.

Is QuiVad affiliated with a regulator or an exchange?

No. It is an independent site republishing information made public by the market authorities, with no link to any of them. The publisher is named in the legal notice.

Does a large short position mean the share will fall?

No. It says one or more funds took that bet on a given date, nothing more, and a bet can be lost. A large position is also what makes a violent rise possible if the sellers have to buy back.

Nothing on this site is investment advice.

I found a mistake, who do I write to?

To [email protected]. A mistake that comes from the regulator file has to be corrected there, a reading mistake is corrected here, and the second kind of report is the more valuable one.