Fca Shorts

UK Financial Conduct Authority daily disclosed net short positions (fca.org.uk) — aggregated and anonymised per issuer under the UK Short Selling Regulations 2025, plus per-issuer position deltas against the historic disclosure file.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• fca_short_positions(issuer?, isin?) — the current FCA-disclosed net short position(s) for an issuer, filtered by name substring and/or exact ISIN. Requires at least one of issuer or isin.
• fca_largest_shorts(top_n?) — the N issuers with the largest currently disclosed net short positions market-wide, sorted descending. Default 20.
• fca_short_changes(issuer?, isin?, since?, top_n?) — per-issuer position deltas: the latest current position against the most recent prior value the historic file shows for the same ISIN. Filter to one issuer/ISIN, or omit both to get the largest market-wide moves (optionally only since a given ISO date).

Auth

Keyless. Both source files (current + historic) are small public CSVs fetched live on every call — no auth wall.

Data sources

• https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/documents/aggregated-current-net-short-positions.csv — current disclosed positions, one row per issuer (~422 rows as of 2026-09-23).
• https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/documents/aggregated-historic-net-short-positions.csv — the transition ledger: every value a current position superseded (~6,016 rows as of 2026-09-23).
• https://www.fca.org.uk/markets/short-selling/notification-disclosure-net-short-positions — the human-readable page these files are published from.

The data is aggregated and anonymised PER ISSUER, not per holder. Under the current UK Short Selling Regulations 2025 regime, individual position holders are disclosed to the FCA privately but never published — every row here is one issuer's total disclosed net short position (sum of everything ≥0.2% of issued share capital). This is a real regime detail worth getting right: older write-ups of the EU-era rules describe a public/private two-tier holder disclosure model that no longer applies to what these files actually contain. Verified live 2026-09-23 by downloading both files directly rather than assumed from documentation.

Complementary to finra (US Reg SHO daily short-sale volume + consolidated bi-monthly short interest, holder-anonymous, US-listed equities): use finra for US tickers, fca-shorts for UK/LSE issuers — a different shape of disclosure (position-level, not volume) entirely.

A longer-retention history ledger (daily snapshots, so "which increased this week" survives the FCA pruning its own historic file) was built but NOT shipped: the live files answer every tool today and nothing would fill the table. The migration and refresh script are in git history at commit e4d2fb0f8 (supabase/migrations/209_fca_short_position_snapshots.sql, scripts/refresh-fca-shorts.mjs); restore them if the historic file starts losing rows or callers ask for trends older than it holds. FCA's Data section is UK Open Government Licence v3.0 (fca.org.uk/legal), which permits that copy with attribution.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fca-shorts": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/fca-shorts/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/fca-shorts/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:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/fca_short_positions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"isin":"GB0033195214"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/fca_short_positions. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fca-shorts": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-fca-shorts"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-fca-shorts

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

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:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Fca Shorts data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT