Short Interest

• An indicator of bearish sentiment: A high short interest suggests that many investors in the market believe that the stock's price will decline.
• Short interest is calculated by dividing the reported number of shares sold short by the total number of shares issued by the company
• In general, short interest above 20% is considered high
• For a period of time leading up to the sneeze, GME short interest was notably in excess of 100%

In 2019 the short interest of GME started to climb significantly. Through 2020 the GME short interest was extraordinarily high, in excess of 100%. This means that there were more shares sold short than the number of shares that were actually issued by the company.

How is such a situation even possible?

Shares of a stock in the stock market are fungible and can be lent to / borrowed by other market participants, and the same shares can be lent and re-lent multiple times.

For example, an investor could own 100 shares of a stock, then earn a fee by lending those shares out to some other market participant that wants to borrow them. The borrower then puts those borrowed shares up for sale (i.e. shorting the stock), where they are bought by some other buyer. Repeating this cycle creates multiple long and short positions tied to the same original shares. In this way, the supply of shares being traded in the market has been synthetically increased beyond the actual number of shares that were issued by the company.

Due to inconsistencies across data providers, it is unclear exactly how high the GME short interest ever reached. According to various sources, the GME short interest was reported to be as high as 141% , 226% , and even 319% .

The short interest of GME fell significantly after the sneeze. These days, it is reported at much more moderate levels (e.g. 16% in December 2025).

However, among some GME shareholders, it is suspected that the actual obligations by those market participants who were short on GME stock leading in to the sneeze are actually much greater than the reported short interest; it is believed by some that shorts never closed.

This is a speculative belief that is not backed by hard evidence; instead, it is suspected that those market participants that were positioned short on GME couldn't have closed all of their short positions, rather, those obligations have been changed into something else such as swaps, which are not required to be reported the way that short positions are, and thus would not show up as short interest.