Market Makers Abuse Short Sale Exemptions, Leaving Retail Investors at a Loss

Published in Stocks and Investing on Tuesday, August 12th 2025 at 15:45 GMT by WOPRAI
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In the past 20 years (since 2005 with the introduction of RegSho), short selling has come under scrutiny as millions of retail investors have discovered what we have been highlighting since early 2005. Market makers abuse the “market maker’s exemption” and short excessive amounts of shares in your stock without locating, borrowing, paying the rebate or the interest rate to borrow. They are required to cover on the same trading day, and our data proves they do not.

The chart below shows “Daily Short Volume” in WaFd, Inc. (WAFD), and includes both EXEMPT (market makers) and NON-EXEMPT (everyone else) short sales. We consolidate the tape of all 14 US stock exchanges and purchase the “sell short” trade identifier data directly from the exchanges on a daily basis. This complete view of the trading in your stock shows a vastly different picture than “Total Short Interest”, which only includes non-exempt short sales that have not been covered by the twice per month reporting date. Unfortunately, this misses the majority of the short selling.

This indicates that a Short Squeeze may be starting in shares of WaFd, Inc. at $30.53, after crossing above the $30.521 Trigger Price. This could signal a buying opportunity, given the right market conditions.

You can find the full report at [ https://www.woprai.com/ ]

Please find the applicable data below, drawn from all major market providers.

Date	Short Volume	Total Volume	Percentage	Squeeze Trigger	$ Value
2025-08-11	167,708	393,236	42.65	29.64	4,970,865
2025-08-08	198,392	363,638	54.56	29.79	5,910,098
2025-08-07	203,609	347,531	58.59	29.4	5,986,105
2025-08-06	252,546	439,296	57.49	29.48	7,445,056
2025-08-05	283,713	494,654	57.36	29.63	8,406,416
2025-08-04	275,653	527,716	52.24	29.28	8,071,120
2025-08-01	455,034	838,309	54.28	28.78	13,095,879
2025-07-31	359,680	673,372	53.41	29.03	10,441,510
2025-07-30	258,040	468,718	55.05	29.34	7,570,894
2025-07-29	259,183	495,277	52.33	29.61	7,674,409
2025-07-28	241,816	456,551	52.97	29.75	7,194,026
2025-07-25	262,630	482,315	54.45	29.69	7,797,485
2025-07-24	242,568	514,967	47.1	29.71	7,206,695
2025-07-23	248,023	528,508	46.93	30.03	7,448,131
2025-07-22	191,922	613,079	31.3	30.14	5,784,529
2025-07-21	333,375	700,432	47.6	30.1	10,034,588
2025-07-18	352,845	750,579	47.01	29.89	10,546,537
2025-07-17	425,910	1,488,977	28.6	29.44	12,538,790
2025-07-16	254,987	640,818	39.79	29.44	7,506,817
2025-07-15	205,952	547,333	37.63	29.57	6,090,001
2025-07-14	191,296	404,736	47.26	30.94	5,918,698
2025-07-11	374,212	599,490	62.42	30.82	11,533,214
2025-07-10	206,281	454,709	45.37	31.16	6,427,716
2025-07-09	195,468	359,535	54.37	30.95	6,049,735
2025-07-08	266,597	713,105	37.39	30.92	8,243,179
2025-07-07	281,437	591,032	47.62	30.8	8,668,260
2025-07-03	126,574	255,631	49.51	31.23	3,952,906
2025-07-02	207,114	411,072	50.38	30.79	6,377,040
2025-07-01	204,962	458,477	44.7	30.33	6,216,497
2025-06-30	172,554	398,097	43.34	29.32	5,059,283
2025-06-27	143,909	451,017	31.91	29.32	4,219,412
2025-06-26	163,887	334,170	49.04	29.38	4,815,000
2025-06-25	141,858	317,362	44.7	28.92	4,102,533
2025-06-24	165,692	434,457	38.14	29.15	4,829,922
2025-06-23	103,249	412,868	25.01	28.65	2,958,084
2025-06-20	343,480	1,248,443	27.51	28.16	9,672,397
2025-06-18	258,379	459,767	56.2	27.91	7,211,358

Total	214,268,646	578,572,569	37.03	30.52	6,540,128,371

* Totals include all data records back to 2020-08-13 00:00:00, data set is truncated for viewing.