At the end of the settlement date of March 15, 2017, short interest in 2,328 Nasdaq Global MarketSM securities totaled 7,352,374,802 shares compared with 7,280,848,100 shares in 2,345 Global Market issues reported for the prior settlement date of February 28, 2017, as announced by Nasdaq.
The mid-March short interest represents 4.54 days average daily Nasdaq Global Market share volume for the reporting period, compared with 4.47 days for the prior reporting period.
Short interest in 797 securities on The Nasdaq Capital MarketSM totaled 745,373,946 shares at the end of the settlement date of March 15, 2017 compared with 706,233,838 shares in 792 securities for the previous reporting period. This represents 2.45 days average daily volume, compared with the previous reporting period’s figure of 2.32.
In summary, short interest in all 3,125 Nasdaq securities totaled 8,097,748,748 shares at the March 15, 2017 settlement date, compared with 3,137 issues and 7,987,081,938 shares at the end of the previous reporting period. This is 4.21 days average daily volume, compared with an average of 4.13 days for the previous reporting period.
The open short interest positions reported for each Nasdaq security reflect the total number of shares sold short by all broker/dealers regardless of their exchange affiliations. A short sale is generally understood to mean the sale of a security that the seller does not own or any sale that is consummated by the delivery of a security borrowed by or for the account of the seller.