What it is
Short sellers borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back cheaper later. Short interest is the share of a company's stock that has been sold short and not yet bought back. Days to cover is that number divided by average daily volume. It is how many normal days it would take every short seller to buy back. When a heavily shorted stock starts rising, short sellers have to buy to limit their losses. Their buying pushes the price higher still. That is a short squeeze.
How Breakaway flags it
A stock gets the Squeeze setup badge when at least 15 percent of its shares are sold short. It also qualifies when it would take five or more days of normal volume to buy back. Either way, at least seven checks have to be firing. The chart condition matters. A heavily shorted stock in a downtrend is shorted for a reason. A squeeze needs the price to already be moving against the short sellers. The Squeeze setups list and the Squeeze setup filter show every stock that qualifies, and an alert can fire when a new one appears.
How to read it
Short interest is collected by FINRA and published twice a month. So the figure on the card can be up to two weeks old, and the card shows the settlement date. Days to cover above five with rising volume is the strongest version. A squeeze candidate with headlines about new share sales or delisting is a trap. That is why the news score subtracts for those.
Short interest vs days to cover
Short interest says how much of a company is sold short: 20 percent means one share in five has been borrowed and sold. Days to cover says how hard it would be to buy those shares back: the shares sold short divided by the average shares traded a day. A stock with high short interest that trades heavily can have low days to cover, and a thinly traded one with modest short interest can have high days to cover.
How days to cover is calculated
Divide the shares sold short by the average daily volume. A stock with 30 million shares sold short that trades 5 million shares a day has 6 days to cover. The figure moves with volume as well as with short interest: a quiet month raises it even when no new short sales were made.
An example from Oct 19, 2026
At the close on Oct 19, 2026, 29 of the 3,014 stocks with a page on Breakaway met the squeeze setup's rules. Among them were Fox (FOXA), Exelixis (EXEL), and Range Resources (RRC).