GNR, the SPDR S&P Global Natural Resources ETF, is having a rough June — and options traders have just swung to their most bullish positioning of the past year, even as the price keeps falling.
The ETF closed at $68.09 on Tuesday, down 5.4% over the past week and off 7.7% over the past month. That's a meaningful drawdown for a broad commodities fund. The move reflects broad softness across energy, metals, and agricultural names — the three pillars of GNR's global mandate. What makes the current setup interesting is the sharp divergence between price and options sentiment.
Options positioning is strikingly one-sided toward calls right now. The put/call ratio has dropped to just 0.03, nearly 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.33. That is the most bullish options skew GNR has printed in the past year — the 52-week low on the PCR is 0.018, and the current reading is closing in on it fast. Put another way, for every put contract in play, there are roughly 32 calls. That kind of skew normally shows up when traders are positioning for a bounce, not a continuation of the decline. Whether this reflects genuine conviction in a commodity recovery or simply a mechanical roll-off of older hedges is impossible to determine from the data alone, but the contrast with the price tape is hard to ignore.
The short-selling picture is notably calm. Short interest in GNR is a negligible 0.55% of free float — down 9.4% over the week and roughly half of where it stood in late May and early June, when around 900,000 shares were borrowed at the peak. Borrow availability is wide open, with shares available at 357% of current short interest, meaning there is more than three times as much lendable stock as there is active short demand. Cost to borrow has drifted lower too, running at just over 1% annually — down about 11% on the week and 15% on the month. The short score of 36.5 sits in the lower half of the ORTEX universe. None of this suggests meaningful conviction on the bear side.
What's particularly notable is how sharply the lending market has loosened since mid-May. In the second week of May, availability was below 60% and borrow cost was running near 1.33%. The unwinding of that positioning has been swift. Short interest has been cut roughly in half from its June 5 high of around 906,000 shares. The lending market now looks loose — a backdrop that would make it inexpensive and easy to re-initiate short positions if sentiment deteriorates further.
The next data point worth watching is whether the extreme call-side skew in options translates into any near-term price stabilisation, or whether it simply unwinds as the ETF continues to track commodity prices lower.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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