EWT — the iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF — heads into mid-June carrying a striking contradiction: short interest has nearly halved over the past month, yet it doubled within a single week, leaving positioning data telling two very different stories depending on which timeframe you read.
The week-on-week picture is the one that grabs attention. Short interest jumped 84% in the seven days through June 16, climbing back to 7.1% of free float from levels that had collapsed to roughly half that over the prior month. The prior month's trend, however, runs sharply in the other direction — SI peaked near 13.7 million shares around May 6-7 and has since fallen by 45% even after this week's spike. What that pattern likely reflects is a fast rotation: traders who built short positions ahead of a Taiwan market pullback scrambled to cover as the ETF surged 13.7% through May and June, and fresh hedgers stepped back in when the fund pulled back 2.4% on Tuesday. The borrow market tells a calm story beneath all this movement. Cost to borrow is a negligible 0.45%, down slightly on the week, and availability is wide open at 321% — more than three shares available to borrow for every one currently shorted. This is nowhere near a squeeze setup. The 52-week tightest point was 13.2% availability, recorded when the fund was under real pressure in early May; the current looseness signals that the short rebuild this week was done with ease, not desperation.
Options positioning reinforces the calmer read. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.76, running below its 20-day average of 0.85 and around 0.65 standard deviations light on downside protection. That's a notable shift from mid-May, when the PCR was running above 1.2 — investors were paying aggressively for puts when the Taiwan market was most stressed. The drift lower since then mirrors the rally in the underlying, with traders progressively unwinding defensive hedges as the ETF recovered. The ORTEX short score has also retreated, falling from a mid-week peak of 57.9 on June 10 to 49.3 today — roughly neutral, neither flashing extreme short pressure nor a clean-up of positions.
Institutional ownership adds one genuinely interesting wrinkle. Tennessee's Department of Treasury is the largest declared holder at 8.3% of shares, but it trimmed nearly 3 million shares in the quarter to March 31. BlackRock, by contrast, added 1.85 million shares through May 31, pushing its stake to 5.4%. UBS Asset Management and HSBC Global Asset Management were also buyers in Q1. The divergence between a state pension reducing exposure and asset managers adding suggests different mandates at work — the pension likely rebalancing a Taiwan overweight, the asset managers expressing a tactical view on Asian tech recovery.
What to watch from here is whether the week's short rebuild proves durable or fades again. The ETF gained nearly 3% on the week despite Tuesday's pullback, and borrow conditions remain relaxed enough that any fresh pessimists on Taiwan's semiconductor cycle can enter without friction — making the direction of SI over the next two weeks a cleaner signal of conviction than a single spike in a thin holiday week.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open EWT on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
