INFL, the Horizon Kinetics Inflation Beneficiaries ETF, enters the back half of August with its short-side story firmly in reverse — shorts down by more than half in a month, borrow conditions easing sharply, and options buyers more call-heavy than they've been all year.
The most striking shift this week is in the lending market, and the direction is unambiguously looser. Availability has ballooned to over 2,000% — meaning there are roughly twenty shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. That is a dramatic reversal from early August, when availability briefly compressed to around 208% on August 10 and utilization climbed toward 44%. Since that episode, the borrow pool has reopened aggressively: availability has more than doubled in a single week, rising 51% from last week's reading. Cost to borrow has followed suit, easing to 2.3% from a recent peak above 4% in early August. The lending market is about as relaxed as it gets for this name.
Short interest confirms the retreat. At just 0.13% of free float — a negligible level by any measure — the directional short bet on INFL has essentially evaporated. That figure is down roughly 67% in a week and nearly 47% over the past month, with the bulk of the unwind appearing to have happened between early and mid-August. The ORTEX short score has tracked that de-escalation in real time: it peaked near 44 on August 10, when short positions were at their heaviest, and has since fallen back to 28.6 — the lowest reading in the available history. There is no meaningful short pressure on this ETF right now.
Options positioning tells the same story from a different angle. Call volume is running well ahead of puts, with the put/call ratio at 0.12 — more than three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.14. That z-score of –3.18 is the most call-skewed reading in recent memory, and the PCR sits close to its 52-week low of 0.003. For an ETF, this kind of extreme is often mechanical rather than speculative — thin options markets can produce outsized z-scores from small volume moves — but the directional lean is unambiguously toward upside exposure rather than hedging.
The price backdrop supports the mood. INFL has added 5.3% over the past month, closing at $52.90. The one-week dip of roughly half a percent is negligible in that context. The fund paid a $0.13 cash dividend in late June, following an $0.08 payment in March, keeping the income profile intact for holders who use it as an inflation hedge rather than a trading vehicle. No earnings events are scheduled — this is an ETF, so the relevant macro catalysts are inflation data prints and commodity-sector moves rather than company-specific results.
The setup to watch is whether the re-expansion of the lending pool attracts fresh short positioning if inflation expectations soften, or whether INFL's month-long rally continues to keep would-be shorts on the sidelines.
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