Blockmate Ventures (MATE.V/MATEF) short interest at 18%? Maybe. An investigation on how to find short interest data in Canada and what it means
There was a post in here yesterday about MATE having 18% short interest:
For people wondering where this user got this data, it was up on the following website:
https://money.tmx.com/en/quote/MATE
This site is the equivalent site for TSX and TSXV listings as NASDAQ.com would be for the NASDAQ.
Now just because this site says the stock has 18% short interest, could that be true? That would imply about 25 million shares are short, assuming the float total is equivalent to the listed shares outstanding. Unfortunately TMXMoney doesn't clarify how they get to the 18.6%, so we are left guessing on both the numerator and denominator in this equation. Yahoo Finance says MATE's float is 91 million. That would imply 17 million in short interest.
Whether 25 million or 17 million, that's quite an extreme jump. Flip side is, this is the official TSX site. This is not Ortex or some other bullshit third party source that often gets things wrong due to outdated data. It should be given the benefit of the doubt.
That being said, there is only one true source that I fully trust for short data in Canada. It's collected by CIRO and the data can be seen here:
CIRO, implied by the name, is the investment regulatory body for Canada. So it's going to have data that is trustworthy. The only problem is that this data is delayed based on twice-monthly releases, like the NASDAQ official short position summaries. The two reports to pay attention to are the:
Short Sale Trading Statistics Summary
Consolidated short position report
The first report is a summary of all the short marked trades that took place on the stock during the time period. Now that doesn't mean it's short interest, because someone could have opened an initial short trade, then covered by the end of the day. Considering how much HFT and penny flipper bullshit occurs on the markets, this number is greatly inflating the true short interest out there, even if the data is technically accurate.
The second report is a report of the open short interest on a stock. CIRO is slow to release it, and so far only has data up to December 31:
It shows only 105,000 shares short, which is up from 7,000 from mid-December. The short marked trades report shows that 6.8 million shares were shorted between December 15th and 31st. From this we can gather than 6.7 million were covered during the time period as well, leading to the 98K increase in short interest:
Since then, another 10 million shares were marked as short trades from January 1st-15th:
Considering that 6.7 million in short marked trades only resulted in a ~100,000 increase in short interest for the second half of December, one would have to assume a similar type of ratio for the trading in the first half of January. Maybe a 500,000 increase, maybe even a million. But 17 million??? Seems very unlikely - in fact impossible - unless all the short marked trades from the second half of December have since been classified as short interest, plus all the short marked volume for the first half of January. MATE.V traded about 6 million shares on the 16th and 17th combined on the TSX, so that could contribute to the jump, but unlikely to be the major source of it.
There is not quite enough data to eliminate the possibility that short interest on MATE is at least 17 million shares. But it does seem unlikely that the math will add up. However, due to the fact this this number is on the TSX's own website, lends it major credibility. There needs to be a very high amount of evidence contradicting that number, and I don't think we are there. One thing we can say based on the short marked volume, is that interest in shorting the stock has definitely increased. I say, let them do it. An increase is short interest usually signifies a financing is coming. But MATE just took a strategic investment from Tony G, and has exclusively used Hivello directly to raise funds rather than the TSXV listing since mid-2023, outside of Tony G's investment. There is extremely little chance this is related to dilution on MATE. Unless, MATE found another strategic partner it couldn't say no to, which is good news.
My investment thesis on MATE is not based on any short squeeze theory at this time (that COULD change if the stock goes parabolic above $1.00), so this is not a game-changer for me. More something to watch with interest.
For those who do view MATE primarily as a short squeeze candidate, I would pay close attention to the data as it comes out. Right now I don't know what to make of this situation as two data sources that I would consider to be trustworthy for TSX listings are showing me two totally different numbers and trying to reconcile them so far doesn't work.