The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Finra listing page.
FINRA short-sale data for US equities — daily short-sale volume from the Reg SHO
daily dataset, and bi-monthly consolidated short interest. Both come from the FINRA
Query API's otcMarket dataset group.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.
The two are different measurements and are constantly confused. Short volume is how many shares traded short on a given day. Short interest is how many shares are currently sold short and not yet covered, reported twice a month by settlement date — that is the "% short / days-to-cover" figure investors quote.
| Tool | What it returns |
|---|---|
short_volume_daily | One symbol's short-sale volume for one trading day, summed across every consolidated-NMS reporting facility: short_volume, short_exempt_volume, total_volume, short_ratio, and the per-facility split. |
short_volume_history | Up to 30 trading days of the same series for one symbol, ending at end_date. One upstream request, not one per day. |
short_volume_top | Symbols on one trading day ranked by short_ratio, with a min_total_volume filter to exclude thinly-traded micros. Scans the full published day (~12,300 symbols). |
short_interest | One symbol's consolidated short interest by settlement date: open short position, change vs the prior settlement, days-to-cover, average daily volume, plus recent history. |
Publishing lag on the Reg SHO data is typically T+1 or better — 2026-08-25's rows were
queryable on 2026-08-25. Omit date/end_date and the pack probes back up to 7 days for
the most recent day with published rows. Short interest settles bi-monthly, so the newest
record is routinely a week or two old — that is the source's cadence, not staleness on
our side.
regShoDaily returns one row per reporting facility per symbol per day. A symbol's
real short volume is the sum of them:
| Facility | Market code | Venue | In consolidated NMS? |
|---|---|---|---|
NQTRF | Q | Nasdaq TRF Carteret | yes |
NYTRF | N | NYSE TRF | yes |
NCTRF | B | Nasdaq TRF Chicago | yes |
ORF | O | OTC Reporting Facility | no — OTC / non-NMS securities |
combined sums every non-ORF facility, which reproduces FINRA's own consolidated CNMS
figure exactly. Verified 2026-08-25 against CNMSshvol20260821: GME on 2026-08-21 sums
to short 1,335,397.220545 / exempt 1,355 / total 2,315,275.403735, byte-identical to that
file's line (whose own market column reads B,Q,N), and market-wide the same day, 12,269
symbols summing to short 3,244,559,759 / total 6,564,367,888.
Until fleet #532 this pack read only the Nasdaq and NYSE TRFs and asserted current data lived "exclusively" there. It does not: omitting Nasdaq TRF Chicago undercounted short volume by 0.77% and total volume by 0.88% market-wide, every day, with a clean 200 and nothing in the response saying so — and far more on any symbol that trades disproportionately on that facility.
ORF is excluded on purpose, and is a different thing from a missing facility: it is a
separate market, not a missing part of this one. A symbol with both gets its ORF volume
listed under otc_reporting_facility rather than folded into the NMS total; a symbol
with only ORF volume is returned with scope: "otc_reporting_facility" and a note,
rather than a zero.
A lowercase letter is FINRA's preferred-share marker. On 2026-08-21 BCpC (Bancorp
preferred series C, 2,267 shares) and BCPC (Balchem common, 52,413) are two different
securities in the same day's data, as are TpC and TPC.
The Query API's equal filter is case-insensitive, so asking for BCPC returns both.
This pack therefore never upper-cases a symbol: it resolves to exactly one security, and
if your input matches several it returns reason: "ambiguous_symbol" with the candidates
rather than adding a preferred series into a common stock's total. When a near-miss
symbol exists, it is named in also_reported so you can see it was left out.
Keyless. The upstream answers without a credential, and no _apiKey is accepted.
Keyless is not the same as unencumbered — see Licence below.
All four tools read the otcMarket dataset group at api.finra.org, covered by
FINRA's Specific Terms for Equity Data,
section 2.3. Two conditions bind us and are not optional:
attribution string, attached centrally in callTool so a new tool or a new
early-return cannot ship unattributed by omission. It leads the object so a model
synthesizing an answer reads it first, and it survives into ask_pipeworx answers
because the answer path passes a pack's structuredContent through verbatim.zeroRated: true on its MCP_PACKS entry): zero credits
on every tier including paid, no monthly-volume slot consumed, not counted as a billable
lookup inside an answer, and quoted as zero in the pre-call cost disclosure. Responses
carry _meta.cost.zero_rated: true. A metered version of any of these tools would be a
licence breach, not a pricing choice — do not remove the flag.End users may not redistribute the data further and are limited to non-commercial
personal or professional use; that condition is stated in the attribution string and in
section 6 of the published terms at https://pipeworx.io/terms.
Do not reintroduce a cdn.finra.org fetch, for a fallback or for freshness. The Reg
SHO daily files published there are a different distribution, outside the Specific
Terms; the general FINRA.org Terms of Use that
govern them instead are stricter — non-commercial use only, no redistribution without
prior written consent, no bulk copying of the website, no creating a database from it,
and an explicit bar on use "in conjunction with any machine learning, neural network,
deep learning, predictive analytics or other artificial intelligence computer or software
program", which is what every caller of this gateway is. Both routes carried 2026-08-21
on 2026-08-25, so there is no freshness trade to make.
Background: fleet #531 and #532, and the licence analysis in
docs/finance-data-ingest-plan.md.
POST https://api.finra.org/data/group/otcMarket/name/regShoDailyPOST https://api.finra.org/data/group/otcMarket/name/consolidatedShortInterestGET https://api.finra.org/metadata/group/otcMarket/name/regShoDailyUpstream quirks worth knowing if you touch this pack: send Accept: application/json or
FINRA returns CSV; limit is capped server-side at 5,000 and the true match count is in
the record-total response header; a query matching nothing answers 204 with an empty
body, not [], so a naive res.json() throws a parse error that reads like a pack bug
when it means "no data for that day"; and sorting is rejected unless the partition key
(tradeReportDate) is pinned with an equal filter, so there is no "latest date" query —
the pack probes backwards instead.
Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/finra/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT