Short Interest & Thesis
Short Interest & Thesis
The Bottom Line
Short interest is not decision-useful for CPRT in this run. No official FINRA reported-position rows were staged, no FINRA daily short-sale volume rows were staged, and the external web-research layer that would normally surface short-seller reports, activist campaigns, or borrow-pressure commentary failed at the API level (HTTP 402 — insufficient credit) across all six planned phases. What we can say from staged data: CPRT trades 8.92M shares per day on 977.6M shares outstanding (annual turnover ~209%), the company carries $4.7B of net cash with a forensic risk score of 18/100 (Clean), and no public short-seller campaign against Copart surfaces in any of the dependency research available on disk. Treat this page as a record of what is missing and what the limited tape and structural facts allow us to rule in or out — not as a positioning read.
Source-quality warning. The institutional-grade answer here is "we don't know." Reported short interest is the only authoritative measure of outstanding short positions, and that data was not retrievable from FINRA in this run. Do not let any other panel on this page substitute for that gap.
Reported SI / Float
Days to Cover
20-Day ADV (M shares)
20-Day ADV ($M)
FINRA SI Rows Staged
Borrow-Pressure Rows
Public Short-Seller Reports
Forensic Risk Score (0–100)
The two blank tiles on the top row are intentional. We do not infer them from any other dataset.
Evidence Inventory — What's Available and What Isn't
Five of seven evidence classes are unavailable or not applicable, one is not retrievable in this run, and only one — generic tape data — is usable. That mix is what drives the "not decision-useful" verdict.
Classification discipline. Reported short interest, daily short-sale volume, public net-short disclosures, borrow indicators, short-seller allegations, and price/volume inference are six distinct categories. None of them is a substitute for any of the others. The page below keeps them separate.
Why Reported Short Interest Is Missing
The two upstream-staged source candidates (FINRA reported positions; FINRA short-sale volume) both returned zero rows for the CPRT symbol. The manifest flags this as a partial data quality state with the explicit limitation: "FINRA returned no reported short-interest rows for this ticker". We do not know whether that is a provider-side gap or a real-world data absence; either way, no reported-position trend, level, or days-to-cover can be honestly computed from this run.
What Tape Liquidity Tells Us (Bounded Inference)
Reported short interest is missing — but liquidity and structural facts still let us bound what crowding could plausibly look like. The numbers below say nothing about how short the name actually is. They tell us what cover dynamics would look like at different hypothetical short-interest levels, given staged ADV and float.
Mechanics: 977.6M shares outstanding × hypothetical SI %, divided by 8.92M 20-day ADV. This is a sensitivity table, not an estimate of where SI actually sits.
CPRT is high-velocity and large-cap — 209% annual turnover and ~0.94% of market cap traded per day. Even at a hypothetical 5% short-of-float, cover would only take ~5.5 days at full ADV. A squeeze setup of the kind that animates small-cap, low-float, high-fee names is structurally implausible here regardless of where reported SI lands, but that does not mean a short thesis cannot exist — it would just have to be a fundamental/governance thesis, not a positioning trade.
Public Short-Thesis Evidence — None Identified
The standard institutional check is: is there a credible public short-seller report, an activist short campaign, an accounting allegation, or a regulatory matter that creates unresolved thesis risk? We searched the dependency research artifacts already on disk for CPRT-relevant material.
The only credible external thesis-risk item that survives source filtering is the DOJ Consumer Protection Branch AML investigation disclosed in the FY25 10-K. That is a self-disclosed regulatory matter, not a short-seller allegation. A consent decree affecting buyer-onboarding could pressure international growth; an accounting outcome is not in play.
Borrow Pressure — No Public Evidence Found
At a $31.7B market cap with 977.6M shares outstanding and 209% annual turnover, the prior on CPRT being hard-to-borrow is low — large-cap NASDAQ names with this float profile typically sit at general-collateral rates. But that is a prior, not a measurement. We have no observed borrow data and should not claim otherwise.
Peer Crowding — Not Computable Here
Peer-context rows were 0 in the upstream stage. We are deliberately leaving the SI columns blank rather than filling them from any other data class. The peer-set definition (CVNA, RBA, LKQ, KAR, ACVA) is the standard salvage / vehicle-remarketing comp set used elsewhere in this dossier.
Comparative note worth retaining. CVNA is historically a heavily covered short among the comp set due to its credit/securitization model; the absence of a CPRT short narrative in the same neighborhood is itself informative — but cannot be quantified in this run.
Tape Context — Strictly Color, Not Positioning
The unusual-volume spikes below come from data/tech/unusual_volume.json and are execution flow, not short-interest data. They show large prints around analyst-event windows in 2018, a 2024 post-earnings flush, and a -11.5% reaction day on 2025-05-23. None of these are squeeze prints — a squeeze pattern usually shows a multi-day gap-up sequence on rising volume; what we see is reaction-day drops and 2018 distribution.
The pattern across the last seven years is high-volume down days, not high-volume up days — the opposite of a squeeze signature. If anything, this tape is consistent with a name where shorts (whoever they are) have been able to add or cover into deep liquidity without paying a friction premium. But again: no observed SI, so we cannot say more.