How is short interest paid out, & is it possible to estimate the amount of short interest being paid?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: femto Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/135984 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. I'm new to stocks & stackexchange. I was wondering if anyone could answer a few questions that I've been unable to find clear answers to in online sources. I appreciate any help. How is this interest paid out? : Is short interest applied to the price at which the stock was originally shorted or the current price? Is it compounded? Is the broker paid by the shorter every day, week, month? Is it possible to estimate the short interest being paid out?: Is there anyway to know or estimate when and at what price the stock was shorted & how much is total being paid out by the shorters in interest?

External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: user187 Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/135992 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. Interest here means something else. It’s referring to the percent of shares that are shorted for a given stock. A stock can have more that 100% of its shares shorted as the shares bought from the short seller can be loaned out again.

External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Bob Baerker Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/135995 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. You're confusing two market metrics. As Joe stated in his answer, the Short % of Float is the number of shares shorted divided by the Float. However, no one here has yet to explain how they arrive at the calculation offered on web sites like Yahoo comes from. When shares are shorted, the borrower pays a borrow rate to the lender. The borrow rate fluctuates and the amount due daily per share is the borrow rate times the closing share price divided by 365. And yes, you pay it for the weekend as well. I can't speak for all brokers but at my primary broker, it accrues daily and the total is deducted from my account at the end of the month. It is not compounded. The aggregate amount of interest owed on short stock each day would be the the above calculation times the number of short shares. The borrow rate for the past 5 days at my broker (not including today) was: 2/02 16.90 % 2/01 18.81 % 1/29 31.73 % 1/28 37.12 % 1/27 50.83 % It is not possible to estimate when and at what price stock was shorted. Only the stock exchanges know that info.