AVEM, the Avantis Emerging Markets Equity ETF, is trading with an unusual internal contradiction: the fund gained nearly 1.9% on the week while short interest quietly doubled from its mid-June lows.
The short-side build is the standout story this week. Short interest has risen 47% over the past month, reaching roughly 1.1% of the free float — still low in absolute terms, but the speed of accumulation is notable. From mid-June, when shorts held just over 450,000 shares, the position has grown to more than 2 million shares. That's a near-fourfold increase in about two weeks. Cost to borrow has risen in step, climbing roughly 47% over the month to 1.4% annualised — still cheap by any measure, but the direction is clear. Availability has tightened meaningfully: after sitting comfortably above 1,000% in mid-June (an essentially frictionless borrow market), it has compressed to around 85%, a sign that the sharp increase in borrowed shares is absorbing what was previously abundant supply.
Options positioning tells the opposite story. Demand for calls is running unusually high relative to recent norms — the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.18, more than one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.35. For most of June, PCR hovered near 0.50; the sharp rotation into calls starting around June 22 lines up almost exactly with when the short interest acceleration began. The two signals are pulling in opposite directions: options traders are the more bullish cohort, shorts the more cautious.
The ORTEX short score of 46.3 sits comfortably near the middle of its range — up from a low of 36 on June 17, but not at a level that flags extreme pressure in either direction. The score's rise over the past two weeks mirrors the short interest build. It doesn't suggest a crowded short, but it does confirm the positioning shift is real and sustained rather than noise.
There is no earnings event on the calendar for this ETF, and valuation data is not applicable in the conventional sense. The most recent dividend was a $0.53 cash payment in early June, in line with the prior year's comparable distribution. Income generation looks stable. The broader context is an EM recovery trade: the fund is up nearly 2% on the week and broadly flat on the month, with the modest one-month dip of 0.5% suggesting a market that has found a tentative floor after a volatile spring.
What to watch: whether the short interest build continues into July or whether the rising cost to borrow — still low but trending higher — begins to slow new position-taking, and whether the call-heavy options skew persists as the fund pushes toward recent highs.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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