Fails to deliver › About this data
Fails to deliver
When a stock is sold, the seller's broker is supposed to deliver the shares to the buyer's broker by the settlement date. When it does not, the trade "fails". Twice a month the SEC publishes, for every settlement date, the balance of shares that had been failed and not yet delivered, with the stock's previous closing price. This feed ranks the largest balances on the latest settlement date by their value, by shares, by share of the stock's average daily trading volume, or by share of its shares outstanding.
- Where it comes from
The SEC publishes the fails-to-deliver data in two files a month, from reports by the National Securities Clearing Corporation.
Who reports it: The National Securities Clearing Corporation reports the balances to the SEC, which publishes them in two files a month.
Official source
- How often we update it
- Twice a month, when the SEC posts a file
- Last updated
- (15 hours ago)
- Coverage
- About two years of settlement dates. The SEC publishes files back to 2004. Before September 2008 only balances of 10,000 shares or more are listed.
- Worth knowing
- These are running balances, not new fails: a share that stays undelivered for ten days is counted on each of the ten days, and the file does not say how old a fail is. The SEC says the numbers are not evidence of abusive or "naked" short selling, and are not necessarily the result of short selling. Fails have many causes, such as processing delays, market makers filling orders and hard-to-borrow shares, and most are cleared within days. The biggest balances are often in funds (ETFs), which have their own creation and redemption process, so the list covers listed companies unless you ask for everything. The value uses the previous day's close from the SEC's file, which may differ from other sources. Before September 2008 the SEC listed only balances of 10,000 shares or more.
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