The most interesting development in FTA this week is not the price — it's how fast the lending landscape shifted beneath what is, by nature, a low-drama large-cap value ETF.
Availability tightened dramatically. A month ago, the borrow pool for this fund was essentially unlimited, with availability running above 9,000% — meaning thousands of shares were available for every share already borrowed. That figure has collapsed to just 110% today, the tightest reading of the past month by a wide margin. The direction of travel is striking: availability was still above 400% as recently as June 11, and has dropped nearly 64% in a single week. Short interest, at just 0.33% of the float, remains trivially small for a fund of this type. But the shares short have risen roughly 60% week-on-week and are up more than 360% from a month ago — an unusual pace for an ETF that had virtually no shorting activity through most of May. Cost to borrow eased late in the week to 2.9%, down from around 4.1% at the start, suggesting the immediate pressure in the lending market has passed its sharpest point — but the structural shift toward a tighter pool is real and recent. Taken together, the positioning picture is not alarming but it is materially different from a month ago.
Options carry no signal here: the put/call ratio has been zero throughout the available history, indicating no listed options activity worth discussing.
The fund's ORTEX short score sits at 49, near the exact midpoint of the 0-100 range and up gradually from around 47 ten days ago. The modest drift higher reflects the tightening borrow conditions rather than any fundamental change in sentiment toward the underlying holdings. FTA's rules-based AlphaDEX methodology selects large-cap value names using factor scoring, and the fund's constituent exposures can diverge meaningfully from plain-vanilla value benchmarks — but with no valuation multiple data available and no analyst coverage by design for a passive-strategy product, the score movement is the cleanest read on how positioning is shifting.
The most recent dividend on record was a $0.36 quarterly distribution announced in March 2026, broadly in line with prior payments, which confirms the fund is operating normally from a distributions standpoint. Price action has been quiet: FTA closed at $96.18, up less than 1% on the day but down about 0.8% on the week, and up roughly 1.3% over the past month. Nothing in the price chart explains the borrow-market activity by itself.
What to watch is whether availability continues tightening toward the sub-50% threshold — the level at which borrow conditions become genuinely restrictive — or whether this week's easing in cost to borrow signals that the short-interest build has peaked and availability stabilises.
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