ISDMR, the Turkish steelmaker Iskenderun Demir ve Çelik, heads into its July 24 earnings release with the lending market as loose as it has been all year — and with a peer group that spent the week going in opposite directions.
The dominant feature in the positioning data is that short sellers have almost no presence in this stock. Borrow availability is effectively unlimited, with more than 11.7 million shares sitting unused in the lending pool and a utilisation rate that has drifted steadily lower over the past six weeks — from 0.05% in mid-May to 0.02% now. That trajectory tells a clear story: what little short interest existed has been quietly covered. The cost to borrow is flagged at around 14%, which sounds elevated, but the history shows that reading has barely moved in years and the most recent data point is nearly three weeks old, so it carries limited signalling value. The borrow market for ISDMR is not tight — it is simply lightly used.
The ORTEX short score sits at 31.8, placing the stock in a broadly neutral zone, and it has barely budged over the past ten days. That stability is itself a data point: there is no fresh wave of short-side conviction building into the July print. The factor snapshot reinforces this read. ISDMR ranks in the 99th percentile on days-to-cover — meaning the small amount of short interest that does exist would take an unusually long time to unwind given typical trading volumes — while the dividend score ranks at the 88th percentile, reflecting the company's historical income profile (though the last declared dividend dates to early 2022, so that score reflects capacity rather than recent action).
The peer picture this week was notably split. EREGL, the most correlated peer and ISDMR's dominant 94.9% majority shareholder, gained 5.2% on the week and 4.5% on the day alone — a sharp contrast to ISDMR's own 4.5% weekly decline and modest 1% Friday recovery. IZMDC and ERBOS both fell harder, down 5.9% and 7.6% respectively. OZYSR was the week's outlier to the upside, adding 3.4%. The divergence between ISDMR and EREGL is worth noting given how tightly the ownership structure links the two — nearly all of ISDMR's free float is held by Eregli, leaving a thin slice of tradeable shares and a naturally illiquid market.
The earnings history adds some texture ahead of July 24. The four most recent releases produced wildly different outcomes: a 6.7% one-day gain followed by a 16.9% five-day surge in late April, a 3.5% one-day gain in February, and two episodes of modest one-day declines of around 2-3% with further five-day weakness. The April result stands out as significantly more positive than the surrounding pattern, though no consistent directional tendency emerges from the small sample.
What to watch into July 24 is whether the steel pricing environment — which has pressured peers across the Istanbul exchange this week — feeds through into the quarterly numbers, and whether the parent company's divergent weekly performance signals any shift in how institutional holders are thinking about the sector at the group level.
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