USO borrow costs collapse as crude adds another 2.4%

USO has extended its recovery for a second week running, but the lending market tells a story that's changed materially since last week's note — the extreme looseness that defined the August 11 reading has reversed, and borrow conditions are now tightening again.

The key shift this week is in the borrow market, and it cuts both ways. Availability has fallen sharply — down 76% on the week to 82%, after reaching 346% on August 11. That earlier looseness was the defining feature of last week's note. It has now evaporated. Cost to borrow, however, tells the opposite story: it has collapsed 57% on the week to just 1.67%, the lowest level in the 30-day history, after running between 4% and 6.7% for most of July and early August. Those two signals are pulling in different directions. Availability is tightening again, yet the cost of borrowing has fallen to near-zero — suggesting the recent shift in share creation and lending-pool dynamics has not yet fed fully through to pricing. Short interest itself is running at 104% of the free float, up 18.6% on the week, with roughly 13.8 million shares short. That 104% figure is structurally possible for an ETF, where authorised participants can create and redeem units on a rolling basis, so the headline number is less alarming than it would be for a single-name equity.

Options positioning reinforces the broadly defensive lean. Puts outnumber calls at a ratio of 1.11 — just above the 20-day average of 1.09, with a z-score of 0.37. That is barely outside the normal range. The 52-week band runs from 0.56 to 2.52, so the current reading places the fund well within its habitual hedging range. Options traders are not expressing anything close to the extreme fear that would accompany a genuine positioning crisis. The ORTEX short score has recovered to 69.5, back near the 70.8 peak it hit on August 7, after dipping to 55.3 on August 11 when availability briefly surged. That dip-and-recovery pattern in the score tracks the availability swing almost exactly — the score fell when lending opened up, and has risen again as availability tightens.

The institutional picture adds some texture. Goldman Sachs holds 52% of reported shares, a position that has been unchanged as of June 30. Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan and Brevan Howard each hold around 9-11%, with HOOPP adding its full position in the most recent reported quarter. Jane Street and Citadel also appear as significant holders — typical for an ETF used heavily by market-makers and systematic funds for hedging oil exposure. The insider data is stale by over 20 years and should be disregarded entirely.

Looking further back at price reactions tied to USO's reporting schedule, the pattern is consistent with underlying crude moves rather than fund-specific catalysts. The August 7 announcement-day move was +5.9%, and the five-day follow-through was +6.5%. The February 27 print saw a 9.3% one-day move, with an outsized 36% five-day gain — likely reflecting the sharp crude spike in that period. None of these are directly comparable to the current setup, but they underline that large single-day moves in USO tend to extend rather than reverse over the following week when accompanied by trend momentum in oil.

The week to watch is defined by whether borrow costs stay at their current lows as availability continues to tighten — that gap between a contracting lending pool and near-zero borrowing fees is the tension that resolves next.