SLV enters July with the lending market telling a very different story from last week — shorts are rebuilding, borrow is tightening, and the ETF has given back another 4% on the week even as it clawed back 1.5% on Tuesday.
The reversal in positioning is the week's defining feature. A week ago, the borrow market was loosening sharply — availability had risen to 117% and cost to borrow had collapsed to 0.30%, signalling short covering into the selloff. That story has now flipped. Availability has tightened back to 78%, down from 117% just five days ago, and cost to borrow has nearly tripled on the week to 0.88% — its highest reading in the 30-day window. Short interest has risen 7% on the week to 6.0% of the free float, recovering most of the ground it lost during last week's covering episode and sitting back near the mid-June peak of roughly 6.3%. The borrow pool isn't critically squeezed — availability above 50% means there is still meaningful room for new short positions — but the direction of travel has clearly reversed from covering to re-shorting.
Options traders are not adding to the bearish chorus. The put/call ratio has actually drifted below its 20-day average, running at 0.50 against a mean of 0.53 — slightly call-skewed and about one standard deviation below recent norms. For context, the 52-week high on the PCR was 0.84, so today's read is well toward the bullish end of the range. That divergence is notable: shorts are quietly rebuilding positions while options participants lean toward calls. The two signals are pointing in opposite directions.
The backdrop makes that tension harder to resolve. SLV has dropped 22% over the past month — one of the sharpest pullbacks for silver in recent years — closing Tuesday at $53.47. The ORTEX short score has drifted higher through the week, reaching 57.4, its highest reading in the 10-day window. That score reflects the cumulative weight of tightening availability, rising short interest, and elevated cost to borrow, even if none of those metrics is at an extreme in isolation. The prior note from June 24 flagged that shorts were covering into weakness; the data now confirms they have returned, and at a faster pace than they left.
What to watch is whether availability continues tightening below 50% — the threshold where borrow conditions shift from tight to very tight — and whether the options market's call-skew holds or reverses as silver tests new monthly lows.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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