JSW — Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa — drifted 0.3% lower to PLN 25.91 on Thursday, and the week's real tension is a cost-to-borrow market that has swung violently while the ORTEX short score quietly reached another record high.
The borrow market has become genuinely difficult to read. CTB more than doubled in a single session this week, jumping from 3.97% on July 21 to 7.59% on July 23 — its sharpest single-day move in the tracked period. That reverses much of the easing that had followed the mid-July peak above 10%, and it breaks the pattern flagged in last week's note, where falling CTB was being read as shorts holding steady rather than adding. The intraday whipsaw matters because it suggests the lending pool is thin enough that small flows move the price of borrow dramatically. Availability confirms the tightness: at 7.9%, roughly twelve shares are lent out for every one free to borrow. That is a slight loosening from the 2.9% record low hit on July 14, but still deep inside very-tight territory. The 52-week low of 2.9% remains a live reference point, not a distant memory.
The short score is the cleaner signal right now. It has ground to 85.5 — a fresh record, up from 85.4 last week and from 84.3 a fortnight ago. The move is incremental but relentless: every session this week printed a higher reading than the one before. The ORTEX factor scores reinforce the picture. Days-to-cover and utilization both rank in the bottom 3rd percentile of the global universe, placing JSW among the most aggressively borrowed names tracked. EPS momentum scores rank in the 100th percentile over both 30-day and 90-day windows — a striking divergence between improving forward estimates and a short position that refuses to retreat.
The valuation case for bears has some support. JSW trades on a price-to-book of 0.50 and an EV/EBITDA of 2.5, both of which look cheap on headline figures. But the PE multiple has contracted sharply — down 1.3 turns over the past 30 days to 6.7x — as the price has drifted. That compression is consistent with a market that is discounting operational risk, not re-rating the stock higher. The Polish state holds 55% of shares, leaving the free float thin, which amplifies the mechanical effects of the tight borrow pool on day-to-day price formation.
The earnings calendar is the next hard catalyst. JSW reports on August 20, and the last print — May 19 — saw a 2.4% one-day drop followed by an 8.3% five-day recovery. That pattern suggests the market tends to sell the number and then reconsider, but the short structure heading into the May release was less extreme than it is today. With availability this constrained and the short score at a record, the August 20 release is less about the earnings beat-or-miss and more about whether any covering flow finds enough borrow supply to execute cleanly.
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