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Short Interest provides reported short interest for a US-listed security. Each observation is one settlement date and carries the shares sold short, the change from the previous report, average daily volume and days to cover. Settlement happens twice a month and publication lags settlement by roughly eight days. History runs from 2017-12-29.
Plan: Professional and above · Credits: 1 per call

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What You Can Use Short Interest For

Track how crowded a short position is and how it changed between settlements. Compute days to cover against average daily volume. Identify securities where short interest is large relative to float. Cross a short build against company news or 8-K events to see what preceded it.

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Short Interest Coverage

Coverage is US-listed securities reported by FINRA. History runs from 2017-12-29. Non-US listings are not covered.

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Short Interest Date Convention

settlement_date is the date the position was measured. Settlement occurs twice a month, at mid-month and at month-end. Publication lags settlement by roughly eight days, so the newest row is never today’s position — it is the position as of a settlement date one to three weeks ago. Results are ordered newest settlement first.

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Key Short Interest Fields

current_short_position is the shares sold short at settlement, and previous_short_position is the prior report’s figure. change_previous and change_percent express the move between them. average_daily_volume and days_to_cover size the position against trading activity. float_shares and float_as_of describe the share count used for ratios. short_percent_float and short_percent_outstanding are those ratios. issue_name, category and market_class_code describe the security. revision_flag and stock_split_flag mark rows affected by a revision or a split.

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Why Short Interest Ratios Can Be Null

short_percent_float and short_percent_outstanding are computed against a share-count source that only covers recent settlements. They are therefore null across the older history, while the reported short position beside them is complete for that whole period. A null ratio means there is no share count for that date. It does not mean the short position was zero. If you hold a float figure for that date, compute your own ratio from current_short_position.

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Short Interest Sources

Short positions are reported by FINRA. Float and shares outstanding come from a separate share-count source, which is why their coverage window differs from the position history. Days to cover and the two percentage ratios are calculated.

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Query Short Interest

Use the short interest endpoint for one company, newest settlement first.
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string
required
A ticker, CIK, ISIN, or canonical cmp_ id.
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string
Earliest settlement date, YYYY-MM-DD. date_lte sets the ceiling.
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integer
default:"100"
Rows per page, between 1 and 1000. Page through with cursor.
See also Daily Prices and Market Cap for the price series to pair with a short build, 13F Institutional Holdings for the long side of the register, and Company Screening, which carries short-interest filters across the whole universe.