A3 · Positioning Extreme

A squeeze setup: a heavily-shorted name whose price refuses to break down, hinting the crowded short is wrong.

The short code A3 is display metadata only. The canonical identifier this archetype is keyed by everywhere — config, the screener_candidates.archetype column, the scorer emit — is the descriptive string positioning_extreme.

Thesis

High short interest by itself is not an edge — short sellers are often informed, and most hated stocks deserve it. The non-obvious setup is crowded-short-INTO-resilient-price: shorts are piled in, the bearish thesis is consensus, and yet the price won’t confirm. When a name carrying heavy short interest holds its ground instead of making new lows, the positioning has gotten ahead of the fundamentals, and the fuel for a squeeze is loaded. The edge is the divergence between extreme bearish positioning and a price tape that refuses to validate it.

Direction

LONG. The setup anticipates a short-covering reversion higher.

What it looks for

The evaluator (evaluate_positioning_extreme) requires the price-divergence leg as mandatory; thresholds from screener_config.json § archetypes.a3:

• Short extreme — short interest as a percentage of float at or above short_pct_float_min=15.0. (The market-data feed reports a decimal like 0.15; the evaluator normalizes sub-1.0 values to percentage points.)
• Price holding (mandatory) — ret_20d >= price_holding_ret_20d_floor=-0.05 (down no more than 5% over 20 days) AND not making new 52-week lows (dist_52w_low > 0). This leg is never relaxed — without it, the screen is just a list of hated stocks.
• Options skew leg (sparse by design) — when options_legs_enabled=true (live), the leg fires on put_call_ratio > skew_pcr_floor=1.5 OR skew_25d > skew_25d_floor=0.05 (the 25-delta risk reversal is on a 0–1 scale, so 0.05 = 5 vol points of downside-fear premium). It reads the latest co_options_daily row, which is watchlist-only — for the vast majority of universe names there’s no row, so the skew leg ABSTAINS cleanly (no score contribution, no error, no penalty to the non-options half).

How it scores

The score is a trigger count: int(short_extreme) + int(price_holding), each worth 1.0 (mirroring squeeze.py’s shape). The state machine:

• none — quality fail, or neither leg fires.
• partial — exactly one leg fires (short-extreme without price confirmation, or price holding without extreme shorts).
• primed — short-extreme AND price-holding AND, when options are on and data exists, skew-extreme too. The firing candidate ranked toward S2.

Pitfalls / when it fails

• Shorts are often right. This is the headline risk: piling into a crowded short opposite informed sellers only works when the price genuinely refuses to break. The mandatory price-holding leg is the entire safeguard — respect it.
• No options data for most names. Because co_options_daily is watchlist-only, the skew confirmation is unavailable for nearly the whole universe. A non-watchlist name can still reach primed on the two non-options legs, but without the skew leg you’re missing the positioning-premium read.
• Short-interest staleness. Float short percentage is reported on a lag; the figure may not reflect covering that’s already underway.

Related

• The Screener System (vision)
• Screener Pipeline & Lifecycle (operations)
• Mechanical reference cards: Score · State · Triggers
• Sibling archetypes: A6 · Vol Mispricing · A2 · Oversold Sympathy