FTD Anomaly Short
In plain terms
When the rolling-month average of failures-to-deliver on a stock hits the top 10% of its own history, informed shorts are aggressively in. Short the stock for the next 4 weeks.
How it works
Internally-motivated hypothesis: persistent high failures-to-deliver (top decile of trailing-year per-ticker FTD distribution) may reflect aggressive informed shorts that cannot locate borrow but commit anyway because conviction is high; short the sustained anomaly. No academic magnitude or alpha claim.
Live results
3 times picked on its own · 29 times inside a blend (19 beat the stock) · updated 2026-06-06Data dependencies
- Daily prices
Adjusted-close OHLCV for every US-listed ticker; primary price feed.
- SEC fail to deliver daily
SEC fail-to-deliver daily ZIP archives normalized by settlement date and ticker.
Expected edge
- Tested over
- T+1 to T+20d
None claimed (experimental hypothesis; the previously cited -1.5%/20d figure was unsupported by the mis-attributed paper).
Example tickers where this is likely to fire
Illustrative only, the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.
Related families
When a stock fails to deliver shares for several days in a row, persistent short pressure tends to keep the price drifting down for another 1-3 weeks.
When settlement fails spike far above normal, we treat it as a possible squeeze-pressure signal and go long briefly.
If a stock has been on the SEC's 'failed-to-deliver' threshold list for many days, brokers are forced to close shorts — sets up a squeeze.
Explore FTD Anomaly Short on alphactor.ai
See which tickers this family is currently firing on, with live signals and rankings.