Is it T 35 or 69? Is it both? Can the rules change? That's the million dollar question.

Back testing the doggy company, it certainly seems like t 35, but I think I found an example of 69 with American Eagle?

AEO had multiple FTDs in September 22 that start on 20220908 with the highest on 20220909 (840,874 shares)and 20220927(507,492 shares). 09/08 was the start of a little recovery and then we see nonstop FTD until it bottoms out on 09/27. The FTD's sum to about 2% of the float. Note the very tip of the peak here was the earnings release on Nov 22 and then trend reverses. I think they got lucky and shook off the squeeze with bad earnings, yet we still see a second peak at the end of Jan 2023 (highest on 2/2/23)...like a second mini t 69 cycle

Zoomed in you can see the sharp spike beginning right before t 69

zoomed out

I think maybe t 69 is rare and is the result of repeated suppression efforts, but results in a much bigger jump. Looking at AEO, they had 1,311,279 FTD on 20240624. A similar number as the above example. Will it jump on Monday? Or will it be a long slow climb into September? Will nothing happen at all?  Also worth noting, the price jumped and began climbing when the FTD data was released...So it seems like others are watching this.

I also believe FTDs are becoming more common? I identified AEO before the FTD data came out just based on unusual volume (see spreadsheet for 6/21)

I also suspect we will see more FTDs for July as the price is clearly getting pegged to $20.

Methodology:

Grab historic data from yahoo. Sort by volume. Grab FTD data for the period 30-75 days prior to highest volume days. Look at chart and key events like earnings, news, and dividends that could explain.

I would like to investigate historic short interest as well. This has to be a large factor but how much? Can we create a regression model based on float, short interest, and FTD?

Let me know if you can find any other examples. Preferably in the XRT basket. I think this might all be connected. I picked AEO to investigate first because I was familiar with them from a 2016 call play and was aware they are heavily shorted...but one data point doesn't make a trend.

Disclosure:

I hold AEO Sep 22 calls

volume data