S3 Partners
Bob Sloan
30 September 2025
In this exclusive interview, Bob Sloan, managing partner and founder of S3 Partners, explains why the firm’s short interest analytics inside Bloomberg’s enterprise infrastructure is a game-changer for clients
Image: stock.adobe.com/Muhammad
S3 Partners, a provider of real-time short interest and securities finance analytics, announced on 16 September that its short interest dataset is now available for enterprise use via Bloomberg Data License.
The data is accessible through Bloomberg’s Per Security service, enabling enterprise customers to select exactly the S3 content they need to align with their business priorities.
Speaking to Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Finance Times, Bob Sloan, managing partner and founder of S3 Partners, provides exclusive insights on the achievement.
Bob, why is the Bloomberg Data License integration such an important step for S3 Partners?
Let me clarify, S3’s data is now available to firms that have a Bloomberg Data License account. It is also available on the Bloomberg Terminal and accessible via the Bloomberg Query Language API in Microsoft Excel and Bloomberg’s BQuant analytics solutions. That market access is global and everywhere, which is amazing.
For clients, the problems that keep market professionals up at night are crowding and concentration risk. If you cannot see them forming, you cannot manage them. By having our short interest and securities finance data available via Bloomberg’s Data License Per Security offering, enterprise buy side and sell side clients can incorporate S3 data into internal systems alongside proprietary information.
Users on the Bloomberg Terminal can see in real time how positioning is shifting and how to react. Whether consumption happens on the Bloomberg Terminal, via Bloomberg Data License, or via the Bloomberg Query Language API in Microsoft Excel and Bloomberg’s BQuant analytics solutions, firms can identify how flows and positioning are structured and where risk is building.
You often talk about short interest as a signal of conviction. Can you expand on that?
Short interest is one of the purest signals of conviction in the market. It shows where investors are betting against consensus, how concentrated those bets are, and where vulnerabilities lie.
Our dataset tracks utilisation and financing rates alongside short interest, so you can see not only where the crowd is, but the pressure points that come with staying short. For all market participants, that visibility is critical — it highlights where lending supply is tightening, where borrow costs are poised to move, and how changes in market conviction will ripple through financing conditions.
How does S3 quantify risk around volatility and potential squeezes?
Volatility is where positioning meets pressure. Our S3 Squeeze Risk metric is the standard for identifying which securities are most vulnerable to forced covering and volatility spikes. Paired with our S3 Crowded Score, which measures multi-factor crowdedness, investors can spot dislocations before they hit the tape. That is how we help clients manage both liquidity stress and timing risk.
Scoring and ranking sound simple, but they seem to be a key part of the value proposition. Why?
Scoring and ranking turns data into action. We do not just provide short interest; we rank securities across 62,000 global names by crowdedness and squeeze risk.
That makes it possible to compare positioning across industries, geographies, or factor baskets. For quants and analysts, that means rankings you can backtest and scores you can plug into models. For portfolio managers, it is an at-a-glance view of where crowding and risk are intensifying.
What does this mean for enterprise clients integrating S3 via Bloomberg?
It means scalability. Clients can layer our data directly into their risk, order management, and trading workflows, as well as desktop spreadsheets/worksheets, and programmatically via Bloomberg’s BQuant analytics solutions.
Bloomberg Data License Per Security customers benefit from the ability to align the exact S3 content fields they need with their business priorities. Whether it is measuring conviction in merger arbitrage, monitoring concentration in crowded growth names, or flagging volatility risks in Battleground Stocks, our data is now accessible for professionals to address positioning risk and signaling, and gain conviction — all embedded within the workflows firms already use.
Crowding. Concentration. Volatility. Scoring. Ranking. Conviction. With S3 data on Bloomberg clients can see the market’s pressure points before they become market events.
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