Stats › Options, shorts and positioning › Short interest
Short interest
Selling short means borrowing shares you don't own, selling them, and hoping to buy them back cheaper later. Short interest is simply the running total of shares that have been sold that way and not yet bought back. US exchanges publish it twice a month, so it's one of the few positioning figures anyone can look up for free.
Right now it's at record levels on three separate measures, and that's why this page exists. S&P 500 short interest hit 3.79% of free float in July 2026, the highest in a series tracked since 2010. The Russell 3000 hit 6.3%, also a record. NYSE listed stocks reached 9% of shares outstanding, against roughly 5% in the 2008 financial crisis and 6% during COVID. More shorting than either of the two worst market episodes in twenty years, while the market sits near highs.
The page covers what the number is, the three different things people call short interest and why only one of them compares across time, and why heavy shorting is not the bearish signal it looks like. That last section is the reason I wrote it, because the intuitive reading of this statistic is wrong in an interesting way. The figures come from exchanges and from two vendors who use different denominators, all dated at the foot of the page. Where a number is a vendor estimate rather than a regulatory publication, I've said so, and it's worth knowing upfront that no regulator publishes an aggregate US short interest figure in dollars at all. If you see one, somebody estimated it.
Short interest in S&P 500 stocks reached 3.79% of free float in July 2026, an all time high in a series tracked since 2010, and the Russell 3000 reached 6.3%, also a record. NYSE listed stocks hit 9% of shares outstanding in late June 2026, against roughly 5% during the 2008 financial crisis and 6% during COVID. In raw share counts, Nasdaq reported 22.9 billion shares short and NYSE Group 22.7 billion at mid July 2026.
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