JSW — Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa — has gained 5.1% on the day and 2.9% on the week to close at PLN 26.40, the second meaningful bounce in three weeks, yet the structural short position has not loosened and the ORTEX short score has pushed to a fresh record high.
The lending market is where the real story sits. Availability has tightened back to just 7.0% — roughly fourteen shares lent out for every one still available — after a brief mid-week easing toward 9.9%. That is still well inside "very tight" territory, and the 52-week low of 3.8% set on June 29 remains a recent reference point. Cost to borrow has eased marginally from 10.8% last Thursday to 9.3% today, but that is still 50% above where it traded in early June, when CTB sat quietly in the 8.3–8.5% range. The month-long move from that corridor to above 9% reflects sustained demand for borrows, not a one-week spike that has since faded. The dtc rank and utilization rank both sit in the bottom 3rd–4th percentile of the global universe — confirming this is one of the most aggressively borrowed names in the market.
The ORTEX short score has now climbed to 84.3, up from 83.7 at the time of the last note and from roughly 73 six months ago. Each of the past ten daily readings has been higher than the one before. The score feeds off multiple inputs: deeply negative return on assets, an Altman Z-score that places JSW in distress territory, days-to-cover in the top decile of the universe, and a 30-day EPS momentum factor that has turned sharply negative even as the 90-day EPS momentum ranks at the 100th percentile — a divergence that points to recent analyst estimate cuts after a period of upgrades. The short score rank itself sits in the bottom percentile of the universe. Valuation offers little buffer: EV/EBITDA is running at 2.5x and the price-to-book ratio is 0.48, both of which have been drifting lower over the past month, suggesting the market is marking down asset values rather than re-rating earnings.
Ownership context is worth noting briefly. The Polish State Treasury holds 55% of shares, which is not a new development but matters for the free float calculation — it compresses the tradable base and amplifies the impact of the short position that has built up among the remaining institutional holders. BlackRock added 35,000 shares as recently as June, and American Century added 57,000, so there is modest institutional buying on the margin. But at 1.2% and 0.5% of total shares respectively, neither position is large enough to meaningfully absorb the short interest. Insider data is stale — the most recent transactions on record date to 2017 — so that angle adds nothing to the current picture.
The next scheduled catalyst is Q2 earnings on August 20. The last two prior prints produced a pattern worth noting: an immediate 1-day dip of roughly 2.4%, followed by a 5-day recovery of around 8%, suggesting the market has tended to sell the announcement and then reconsider. With the short score at its highest recorded level and availability still critically tight, the gap between the next print and today is what to watch — specifically whether the lending pool tightens further toward the June 29 low, or whether this week's partial easing marks the beginning of a more durable loosening.
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