Days to cover by liquidity band: median stays low, the extremes live in thin names

Answered against 22 years of US equities and 12 years of US options data and published with the query that produced it. This result is stored as of 2026-08-22, from Highest Days to Cover Stocks Right Now.

Rows × columns

5 × 4

Computed

2026-08-22

Completeness

No missing values

Source

US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data

Licence

Strasmore terms · free, no signup

Formats

JSON · CSV · the SQL below

What each column holds

Computed from Strasmore's warehouse of US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data. Equity prices are delayed; options greeks and implied volatility are end-of-day. This result is stored, not recomputed on load — it is exactly the numbers that were returned on 2026-08-22, and the query below is what returned them.

SELECT multiIf(avg_daily_volume >= 2e7, '1 Very liquid (20M+ ADV)',
               avg_daily_volume >= 5e6, '2 Liquid (5-20M ADV)',
               avg_daily_volume >= 1e6, '3 Moderate (1-5M ADV)',
               avg_daily_volume >= 2e5, '4 Thin (200k-1M ADV)',
                                        '5 Very thin (<200k ADV)') AS liquidity_band,
       count() AS names,
       round(quantileDeterministic(0.5)(days_to_cover, cityHash64(ticker)), 1) AS median_dtc,
       round(max(days_to_cover), 1) AS max_dtc
FROM global_markets.stocks_short_interest
WHERE settlement_date = (SELECT max(settlement_date) FROM global_markets.stocks_short_interest)
  AND days_to_cover > 0
  AND ticker NOT IN ('SPCX')
GROUP BY liquidity_band
ORDER BY liquidity_band