MOO, the VanEck Agribusiness ETF, is heading into the final week of June with short sellers continuing their retreat and options traders maintaining an unusually strong call-side lean — a combination that has now held for nearly two weeks.
The short-side unwind has accelerated since the previous note flagged it on June 16. Short interest has fallen another 20.5% over the past week, bringing the current reading to just 1.6% of free float. That's roughly 128,600 shares — down from around 326,000 as recently as June 8, and less than a third of the late-May peak near 405,000. The direction is unambiguous: whatever drove bears to build positions through mid-May has fully reversed. At 1.6% of float, short interest is low enough that it carries little informational weight as a directional signal.
The borrow market reflects the same story. Availability has exploded to 7,327% — meaning there are roughly 73 shares available in the lending pool for every one currently borrowed. That's a dramatic reversal from late May, when availability tightened to below 50% and the ETF briefly looked like it could face squeeze conditions. Cost to borrow has more than halved over the past week, falling to 0.48% from just over 1% in mid-June. The lending market is now about as loose as it gets for this name.
Options positioning is the more interesting tension. The put-call ratio jumped to 0.17 on June 23 — nearly four standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.059. That z-score of 3.92 is almost identical to the reading flagged in the June 16 note, when the PCR first spiked. The persistence is notable. For most of May and early June the PCR barely moved, tracking between 0.03 and 0.06. It has now held well above that band for more than a week, suggesting the burst of call-buying is not simply noise from a single session. The 52-week PCR range runs from 0.013 to 1.08, so absolute levels remain modest — but the deviation from recent norms is the signal, not the magnitude.
The ORTEX short score has drifted lower all week, easing from 32.3 on June 10 to 27.2 now. A declining short score alongside falling short interest and a loose borrow market points to reduced bearish conviction across the board. Institutional ownership data (as of March 31) shows Jane Street entered a new position of roughly 302,000 shares last quarter, consistent with the ETF-arbitrage activity one would expect from a market maker, rather than a directional bet.
MOO has pulled back 1.8% on the week and 4.6% over the past month to $76.54, giving back some of the agribusiness-driven gains flagged in the June 16 note. The ETF tracks fertilizer producers, agricultural equipment makers, and crop-input companies — names sensitive to both commodity price moves and growing-season weather. With no scheduled earnings event for the ETF itself, the week ahead is less about a binary catalyst and more about whether the persistent call skew in options reflects genuine conviction in the underlying constituents, or simply residual positioning that has not yet unwound.
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