HACK has climbed 12.8% over the past month to $109.72, making it one of the cleaner momentum trades in the current tech rally — but the lending market underneath it has been anything but quiet.
The most interesting tension this week is between a strong price trend and a borrow market that briefly ran completely dry before snapping back.
Availability collapsed to 39.3% on July 3 — the tightest reading of the past 52 weeks, meaning barely one share remained available to borrow for every two already lent out. That's a meaningful constraint for would-be shorts. By July 7, availability had rebounded sharply to 108.7%, loosening back into the normal range as the lending pool refreshed. Cost to borrow tells the same story in reverse: it peaked near 1.46% on July 3 and has since eased to 1.01%, down 16% on the week and 29% over the month. The July 3 squeeze was real but short-lived. Positioning looks uncomfortable rather than structurally crowded.
Short interest itself gives little reason for alarm. At just 0.49% of the free float, bears have no meaningful foothold in HACK. The headline daily jump — shares short rose 57.7% on July 7 — sounds dramatic but translates to roughly 47,000 additional shares in absolute terms. That's noise for an ETF of this size. The month-on-month increase of 76% similarly reflects a small base rather than a genuine build in conviction. Options confirm the relaxed sentiment: the put/call ratio runs at 0.46, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average of 0.46, with a z-score near zero. There is no options-market hedging signal worth calling out this week.
The ORTEX short score of 46.0 is in the middle of its recent range, having dipped to 37.8 on June 25 before recovering. That mid-June dip coincided with availability briefly loosening dramatically — above 399% on June 25 — suggesting a wave of short covering cleared out prior positions. The score's subsequent recovery to the mid-46s tracks the re-tightening of availability and the rebuild in shares short through late June and into July.
What to watch next is whether the borrow market stabilises at current levels or tightens again around the 39% floor seen on July 3 — a repeat of that constraint, sustained rather than intraday, would be the first signal worth monitoring for anyone tracking the short side of the cybersecurity trade.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open HACK 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.
