There is significant reason to think those numbers do not accurately represent the actual amount of short shares.
The SEC has a paper about how the Hedge Funds can reset failure to delivers.
https://www.sec.gov/about/offices/ocie/options-trading-risk-alert.pdfEssentially the short Hedge Funds (SHF) can "close" their shorts, say they've closed them, then have a certain amount of time to deliver those shares. If they take too long, it becomes a "failure to deliver" (FTD) (iirc after 3 weeks?).
What they can do--per that paper (and evidence we've seen)--is then reset the clock on the FTD so that they have a new gap of time to deliver. And then repeat that X amount of time later (again, I think around 3 weeks, but you can look this up).
It's been discussed a lot on Reddit, I literally just threw out two links from the last day or two at the bottom of this post that I'm copy/pasting from to save time, but there's a lot more explanation over the last few weeks if you want to go dig it up.
What the SHF can do, per that paper, is either of these type of options trades:
"- A buy-write trade, i.e. selling deep ITM call + buying a synthetic long share from MM
- Buying a married put: buying an option put with a synthetic share."
Why would you buy these calls instead of shares, what's the difference? -- Calls don't change the share price and calls can reset the FTD. You immediately exercise the calls via synthetic short shares on the other side of the trade, and now you use these executed shares to show you've "covered" your short. Weeks later you have a FTD on your synthetic shorts you used to make the trade, so you do it again.
We've seen this actually happen. A whole bunch of calls were bought for $14, 15, 16, 17, 18, etc. just this week for an April 16 expiration. Who is buying millions of dollars of deeply ITM calls?
For the last few months, on a very cyclical pattern, we've seen this happen, deep ITM calls to be immediately exercised to hide FTDs. Indicating there are a LOT more shorts out there than being reported, because they don't have to report those numbers, they just keep kicking the can down the road.
Another example--Melvin Capital revealed 6,000,000 puts in their SEC filing from February--quite likely to have been used for this method.
The SEC put out that paper for regulators to look for activity like that, but the SHFs can and are use it as a playbook.
In my opinion, there's reason to think the short positions are much higher than the data you quoted.
Sources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GME/comments/mi31m6/deep_itm_calls_activity_pt2_april_1st_708000_ftds/https://www.reddit.com/r/GME/comments/mibedc/the_moass_wont_happen_until_options_are_not/I think the reported numbers don't tell the whole story. Anyways, I doubt I'll defend this much, so if you disagree, all good. If the evidence isn't compelling to you, sure, I can see that. We'll agree to disagree for now, and see what happens. :)