MSDL's lending pool is near empty. The put-call ratio just hit a two-week high. And the ORTEX short score jumped 10 points in a single day. Three signals. Same stock. Same week.
Availability on MSDL sits at just 1.43%. For every 70 shares already borrowed, barely one remains available to lend. That is critically tight. The lending pool has been fully tapped — or nearly so — for much of the past six weeks, with availability briefly touching 0.29% on June 30.
Cost to borrow tells a more complex story. CTB peaked at 7.73% on June 29 and has since dropped 67% to 2.32%. That sounds like relief. It isn't. CTB can fall even as availability stays near zero when existing borrowers roll positions at lower negotiated rates. The borrow remains extremely hard to find. The cost of holding that borrow just got slightly cheaper.
Short interest has grown ~19% over the past month to roughly 4.35 million shares. Float data isn't available to calculate SI as a percentage of free float, but the raw trend is clear: short sellers have been building positions steadily since early June.
MSDL's ORTEX short score jumped from 65.1 on June 22 to 75.4 on June 30 — the sharpest weekly move in the visible history. That places it firmly in elevated territory. The score incorporates borrow dynamics, short interest trends, and related lending signals. A 10-point jump in a week is notable for a BDC that typically trades quietly.
The put-call ratio moved to 0.70 on July 1. That is 35% above its 20-day mean of 0.52 and carries a z-score of 2.14. Options flow was steady and muted for most of June. The shift higher in puts is recent and sharp.
For a fund like MSDL — a non-traded, lower-liquidity BDC — elevated options hedging demand alongside a fully tapped borrow market is an unusual combination.
Institutional holders offer a mixed picture. RiverNorth Capital added 287,808 shares in Q1. Russell Investment Management added 479,532. Van Eck added 161,910 as recently as May. These are meaningful builds. Against that, Morgan Stanley — the largest holder at 13.4% — trimmed 134,883 shares in the same period.
Insider activity is stale (last recorded in early March), so no fresh signal there.
Next earnings are due August 7. The last three prints produced modest stock moves — down 2.2%, down 1.3%, and up 1.2% on the day. Nothing dramatic. But the borrow crunch and options shift suggest some participants are positioning ahead of that date.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open MSDL on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
