Re: +57% at 2:30pm ET, SDLP +10% so far today
>>>The remnants of the SDRL short cartel seemed to have lost their desire to stick together when several ran and got out the door starting at 11:30am ET today ... when volume started to take off. Shorts still had 29 million shares short as of most recently announced measurement date, 3/29/18. Several times today the shorts have ADDED to their position, in effort to keep PPS from getting triple digits ... most recently over the past 10 minutes. Also possible that whoever had loaned out lots of their shares (guess who) decided to tell his broker(s) to recall some of his shares (now that BK judge has ruled) - which would force many shorts to buy SDRL so they can returned what they borrowed. As I recall there is a several day period to redeliver the borrowed shares; so this may go on for a few days. Naturally, do not know how many shares have been recalled ... many only be the first part of a larger recall.
All this may be true as you wrote it, but I'll just apply Occam's razor.
The reason SDRL is up is because the last obstacle to a successful Ch 11 re-organization was just removed. The judge approved the final plan. . .its effectively a "done deal" now. SDRL *will* be re-capitalized, and shareholders *will* get some tiny piece of the new pie.
Everything else (short covering, new buying, whatever) just flows from that.