SOXX has had a volatile week: up 5.2% over seven days, then dropping 5.9% on Tuesday alone to close at $591.24 — and the short sellers who've been building this position for six weeks are only barely standing down.
The most important development in the lending market is a genuine shift in availability. Two weeks ago this note flagged availability at 11.5% — one share left for every eight already borrowed, and a pool that had drained from 175% in early May. That squeeze has partially reversed. Availability jumped to 70.4% by Tuesday's close, up from a low of 10.1% on June 11 when the lending pool was nearly exhausted. Cost to borrow has pulled back too, falling 30% on the week to 1.91% — still double the mid-May rate, but no longer running hot. This is a meaningful loosening. The borrow market is not in the distressed state it was just days ago.
Short interest, though, has not unwound in any meaningful way. Bears still hold roughly 18% of free float — down only marginally from the 18.5% reported in last week's note. The weekly change is a modest 6.5% increase in shares short, and the monthly build remains 31% higher than a month ago. The position is near its largest level since ORTEX began tracking this accumulation in early May. What's changed is the ease of maintaining it, not the size of it. Shorts added aggressively through the rally, through the 10.4% single-day selloff on June 4, and have not moved to cover in any size during this week's partial rebound. The conviction read has not changed.
Options positioning adds an interesting wrinkle. The put/call ratio at 2.78 is elevated in absolute terms — still well above 1.0 — but it's actually running below its 20-day average of 3.10, sitting roughly 1.3 standard deviations on the less-defensive side of recent norms. The 52-week range for PCR runs from 1.28 to 3.73, so the current reading places options traders in the middle of their historical range. The persistent put-heavy structure reflects endemic hedging in a high-SI ETF, not a new burst of fresh defensive positioning this week. If anything, options traders pulled back from peak caution while the stock was recovering.
The ORTEX short score, at 66, has held in a tight band all month — between 66 and 67.4 — showing no sign of either escalating short pressure or a meaningful unwind signal. That stability, combined with the institutional ownership picture (Goldman Sachs at 6.2% as of March 31, with Susquehanna adding over 1.1 million shares in Q1), suggests the ETF continues to attract sophisticated participants on both sides. The 5.9% single-session drop on Tuesday came just two weeks after a 12.3% one-day collapse on June 4 — the largest event in recent history produced a five-day loss of only 4.7%, suggesting the tape absorbed that move better than the initial print implied.
What to watch: availability has loosened significantly from its June 11 floor, but if SOXX continues to recover toward recent highs, the pressure on bears to cover — or extend — will be the defining tension in the lending market over the next few sessions.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open SOXX 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.
