AMDL — the GraniteShares 2x Long AMD Daily ETF — enters mid-July with its lending pool completely dry and short interest climbing at a pace that stands out even for a leveraged product.
The most striking feature of the current setup is the borrow market. Availability has dropped to zero — every share in the lending pool is currently lent out, matching the tightest reading of the past year. That means new short positions simply cannot be opened through the normal lending mechanism. The squeeze on borrow has been building since late last week: availability was above 17% as recently as July 9 before collapsing to zero over the following three sessions. Cost to borrow has moved with it, rising 12% on the week to 4.45%, after touching a recent low near 3.57% on July 8.
Short interest itself is the other side of that story. Shorts now account for 8.6% of the float — up 36% in a single week. To put that in context, positions had been running between 1.9 million and 2.6 million shares through most of late June and early July. They've since climbed to 3.49 million as of July 14. The direction is unambiguously higher. The ORTEX short score has moved in lockstep, ticking up from 63.6 at the start of July to 67.8 now — not at an extreme, but rising steadily across seven consecutive sessions.
Options positioning tells a different and notably calmer story. The put/call ratio is running at 0.43, marginally below its 20-day average of 0.45 and well off the 52-week high of 0.58 touched in early June. There is no meaningful demand for downside protection in the options market right now. That's a genuine divergence: shorts are rebuilding aggressively in the lending market at the same time that options traders are leaning bullish, or at least neutral. The z-score of -0.52 confirms the put/call ratio is if anything slightly below its recent norm.
The price action explains some of that optimism. AMDL has gained 11.4% on the week and 8.1% on the month, closing at $71.49 on July 14. For a 2x daily-reset product tracking AMD, that kind of run carries its own embedded caution: daily compounding amplifies both gains and losses, and the return profile over multi-week horizons can diverge meaningfully from twice AMD's spot return. Shorts may be betting on that very mechanic — that the recent run overshoots, and rebalancing drag eventually erodes the gains — while options buyers are simply riding momentum on the underlying.
The key tension to watch is what happens to borrow availability. With zero shares available and short interest still rising on ORTEX's daily estimate, any fresh round of short-selling demand has nowhere to go unless new shares enter the lending pool — a dynamic that, if it resolves sharply, could create a volatile unwind in either direction.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open AMDL 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.
