Pavel, a couple of thoughts on this.

First, the most up-to-date short data is provided by Ortex, who covers about 85% of brokerages in real time. Their report for today shows 2.04MM shares currently short (or about 2.85% of the free float), which is the highest ever for PYR and more than twice the amount short during the short attacks of the past:

https://cdn-ceo-ca.s3.amazonaws.com/1gn6je1-ortex-pyr-oct22.png

To your point about the shares being already sold... of course they are all sold, as the point of shorting is to sell immediately then buy back in and return the shares when the price is lower. But you miss the mark suggesting that then has no impact, as it leaves out how short attacks work.

Shorts will use two blocks of shares: one block they buy and sell immediately to short, and the other they use daily to push the price down -- with the second block not even necessarily sold, just repeatedly stacked in the ask. How? By creating curtain walls (or even iceberg sells) on the Ask, and slowly forcing the price down all day. You can see it happening in real time, as a block of 20,000 shares is put on the ask, so if you hope to sell your shares you gotta move below it, whereby before of after the sale they just continue to move the wall down immediately so the next sale has to be even lower. This is particularly effective on low volume stocks like PYR, where it doesn't take much to create a blocking wall in that manner (10,000-20,000 shares will do it), and when there's no expectation of large buy bids to take out the wall.

Finally, there is a very high dark pool short activity. For the past month in the US exchanges, between 46% and 72% of all trade volume has been short volume done in the dark pool. Spiking even to 85.8% of the daily volume on Oct 5.

https://cdn-ceo-ca.s3.amazonaws.com/1gn2t68-table-short-volume.png

Here's the dark pool short volume (squiggly line) vs the price, and how they interact. You can see the impact on lowering the price: https://cdn-ceo-ca.s3.amazonaws.com/1gn2ta8-price-short-volume.png

Here's one site of several that show dark pool data: https://www.stockgrid.io/darkpools/pyr

While generally I have no time for short / manipulation conspiracies myself, the data seems to back it up in this case.

Obviously any planned selling isn't helping, and Peter's broker is also likely being forced down via the method outlined above, and combined with the low volume and the contract delays it's a somewhat easy shorting target, unfortunately.