ETH Call Bulls Vindicated as Price Recovers

ETH has staged a meaningful recovery this week — and the options traders who held calls through last month's slide are finally seeing the trade pay off.

The price reversal is the headline. The fund closed at $17.06 on June 16, up 8.4% on the week — a sharp turnaround after the nearly 29% monthly drawdown flagged in the June 10 note. The one-month loss now reads -19%, still significant, but the weekly momentum has shifted decisively. This is the first meaningful upside week since the fund launched, and it arrives just as the call-heavy positioning that looked stubborn through weeks of selling has started to be rewarded.

The options setup reinforces that bullish lean, though the signal has sharpened further. The put/call ratio dropped to 0.253, now nearly three standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.308 — the most call-dominated reading in the 52-week range of 0.111 to 0.389. A z-score of -2.84 is extreme by any standard. Options traders have not rotated toward puts despite the recent bounce; if anything, the call concentration has deepened. That persistence over multiple weeks moves this beyond noise.

Short interest has collapsed alongside the rally. Shorts fell 81% week-on-week to just 0.54% of the float — a near-complete unwind from the June 8 spike that briefly pushed short interest above 2 million shares. The borrow market reflects that exodus: availability has exploded to roughly 9,948%, meaning nearly 12.8 million shares are available to borrow against a very small short book. Cost to borrow eased 20% on the week to 0.54%, near the cheapest levels of the past 30 days. The short score has dropped to 26.5, down from a peak of 44.6 on June 8 — the lowest reading of the past two weeks. Taken together, the lending market is essentially wide open, and there is no squeeze dynamic in play.

The ORTEX short score at 26.5 reflects that the short side has gone quiet. Availability running above 9,900% is close to the practical maximum — the lending pool is barely touched. Borrow cost at 0.54% is trivial, confirming that no meaningful conviction short position has rebuilt after the unwind. The gap between the call-heavy options structure and the deflated short book is the defining tension right now: one side is positioned for continuation of the bounce, the other has largely walked away from the bearish trade.

The week to watch is whether the price recovery sustains above $17 as the one-month loss continues to heal, and whether the extreme call skew begins to normalise or attracts fresh put buying from traders who missed the move.