Three things this tool does differently
It tells you how old the number is.Short interest is a twice-monthly snapshot, never a live figure, and the freshest datapoint available anywhere cycles between roughly nine and twenty-six days old. Several popular tools display it beside a live-updating price with no date attached, which invites you to read a three-week-old position as today’s. Every page here leads with the settlement date, the age in days, and when the next cycle is expected.
It will not show percent of float. That is the headline metric across this category and it cannot be computed honestly from free data, because no free source publishes a float share count. What free sites label float is either shares outstanding renamed or a licensed commercial estimate. We publish percent of shares outstanding, from filings, and say which one it is.
Days to cover uses FINRA’s own two figures, not FINRA’s own answer.Shares short divided by average daily volume, both published by FINRA. We deliberately do not republish FINRA’s own days-to-cover field, because it is floored at 1.00: more than a third of all securities are published at exactly 1.00 and nearly every one of them is genuinely below it, in one case a true ratio of 0.03. Tools that invent their own average-volume window have the opposite problem, which is why both operands here are FINRA’s.
Short interest is not short volume
These get conflated constantly. Short interest is the number of shares currently held short, reported twice a month. Short volume is how many shares traded on a given day were sell-short orders, published daily. A high daily short volume does not mean a large short position, because most of it is market makers hedging and closing within the session. This tool shows short interest.