At the end of the settlement date of September 30, 2016, short interest in 2,325 Nasdaq Global MarketSM securities totaled 7,507,019,393 shares compared with 7,538,279,223 shares in 2,320 Global Market issues reported for the prior settlement date of September 15, 2016. The end-of-September short interest represents 4.16 days average daily Nasdaq Global Market share volume for the reporting period, compared with 5.32 days for the prior reporting period.
Short interest in 769 securities on The Nasdaq Capital MarketSM totaled 678,585,637 shares at the end of the settlement date of September 30, 2016 compared with 656,881,748 shares in 772 securities for the previous reporting period. This represents 2.97 days average daily volume, compared with the previous reporting period’s figure of 2.93.
In summary, short interest in all 3,094 Nasdaq securities totaled 8,185,605,030 shares at the September 30, 2016 settlement date, compared with 3,092 issues and 8,195,160,971 shares at the end of the previous reporting period. This is 4.03 days average daily volume, compared with an average of 4.99 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.