DJT enters the post-earnings session with the narrative flipped: the call-heavy positioning that defined last week has collapsed, and short sellers have staged their sharpest weekly build in months.
The earnings print was the inflection point. DJT reported on August 10 and fell 12.7% the next day — a painful outcome for the bulls who had piled into calls at historically low put/call ratios ahead of the release. The stock now trades at $8.91, down 14% on the week and off more than 12% from the $10.21 close that preceded the print. Options sentiment has already begun to normalise: the PCR has drifted back to 0.61 from the 52-week low of 0.6064 hit just before earnings. The most bullish options setup of the past year met a negative catalyst, and the unwind is underway.
Short interest tells the post-earnings story most sharply. Bears added aggressively on the print — shorts jumped 21.7% in a single session on August 11, pushing the short position to 17.2 million shares, or 6.1% of the free float. That is up from roughly 14.1 million the prior day and nearly 19% higher than a week ago. The contrast with the pre-earnings picture is stark: just days ago, the previous notes here flagged short interest at 5.1% of float and shrinking. The data has materially changed. The borrow market tells a more nuanced story, though: cost to borrow has actually eased to 0.75%, down 14% on the week and well below the elevated levels seen in mid-July. Availability has loosened considerably — running at 70% relative to short interest, up from around 45% earlier this month. That means the renewed short build is not yet straining the lending pool. Bears can still get access without paying a premium.
The ORTEX short score reflects the shift. It climbed to 66.9 on August 11, up from 63.3 the day before — a move that takes it to a fresh recent high and above the 66.8 peak flagged in the July stock-score note as a six-month ceiling. Days-to-cover rank sits in the 7th percentile, and the short score rank in the 10th. Those readings suggest the composite signal is now more bearish than roughly 90% of comparable names. The factor picture offers little fundamental support to offset that pressure: quality and profitability remain weak, and with no next earnings date on the calendar, there is no obvious near-term catalyst to force a short-covering event.
Institutional ownership adds one structural note worth tracking. BlackRock reported adding 4.9 million shares as of July 31, lifting its position to 13.1 million shares — a meaningful build for an index manager and one that likely reflects passive-flow rebalancing rather than a discretionary conviction bet. Yorkville Advisors, by contrast, cut 5 million shares in the same period. Donald Trump himself holds 114.75 million shares unchanged, a 41% anchor stake that structurally constrains the float available to borrow. That anchored float is part of why any sustained short build tends to be self-limiting — there simply isn't as much freely circulating stock as the headline market cap might imply.
What to watch next: whether the post-earnings short build continues to accumulate at this pace into next week, and whether the loosening borrow market — currently the most available it has been since late July — tightens again as new shorts compete for the same constrained float.
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