Pershing Square USA enters the back end of June in an unusual bind: the stock is down 7% on the week and nearly 9% over the past month, yet insiders committed half a billion dollars at launch — and the borrow market tells a rapidly changing story underneath.
The lending market has shifted dramatically in recent weeks. Through late May and into early June, borrow availability was essentially unlimited — readings above 5,000% mean the pool of available shares dwarfed the short position by a factor of fifty or more. That has since collapsed. Availability is now 229%, still within the normal range but representing a 74% tightening in a single week. The pattern is clear: a meaningful wave of new shorting began around June 9, when shares short jumped from roughly 234,000 to over 350,000 within days. Cost to borrow tells the same story in reverse — it peaked above 17% in mid-May and has since eased to around 1.76%, suggesting the initial scramble for borrows has settled into a more orderly short position. Shares short have also pulled back 25% this week from a mid-week spike, hinting that some of that positioning is already being covered.
The fund's ORTEX short score has climbed sharply — from 29 at mid-month to 40.5 now — reflecting the tightening borrow conditions and rising short interest relative to historical norms for this name. Yet the absolute level of the short position remains tiny: fewer than 267,000 shares, against institutional holders alone reporting well over 16 million shares. That leaves the short position better described as a structural friction than a genuine bear thesis.
The ownership picture is the genuinely striking part of this note. At the April 30 launch, insiders and related parties put in over $544 million net — Pershing Square Capital Management committed $182 million across two tranches, a President-level holder added $12.5 million separately, and CEO William Ackman personally bought $1.75 million at the $50 IPO price. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas arrived as the largest third-party holder with 10.27 million shares. Since launch the stock has drifted to $36.95, meaning every one of those April 30 buyers is sitting on a loss of roughly 26% from the offer price. Trustee Bruce Herring added 5,000 shares at $40.25 on June 17 — a small but meaningful sign that at least one insider views the discount as worth buying into rather than away from.
Valuation metrics reinforce the discount story. The price-to-book sits at 0.69, meaning the market values the fund's assets at a 31% discount to their book carrying value. The P/E is just 8.6x. For a newly listed closed-end fund managed by a high-profile activist, that discount is the central debate: whether it closes as the fund builds a secondary-market following, or whether it widens further if the stock continues to underperform and skepticism about the vehicle's structure grows.
The week ahead turns on whether the NAV discount attracts incremental long buyers or whether continued price weakness emboldens more shorting — the availability trajectory, which has already moved three orders of magnitude in six weeks, is the clearest real-time indicator of which side is gaining ground.
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