The Amundi Core MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF (AEMD) heads into the final week of August with its most notable story sitting in the lending market rather than the underlying index — borrowing costs have roughly halved in a month even as the fund quietly grinds higher.
The cost-to-borrow tells the clearest tale this week. At 3.05%, it has fallen nearly 46% from where it was just seven days ago and is roughly half the mid-July peak of 9.4% — a level it briefly touched twice in quick succession before retreating. That July spike was sharp but short-lived, and the descent since has been orderly. The easing in borrowing costs does not reflect any stress in the lending pool itself: availability is effectively uncapped, with over 41 million shares sitting idle in the borrow market. No meaningful fraction of those shares is being tapped. For context, the tightest the availability has been in the past year was around 28% — a reading that now looks like a distant anomaly given the current abundance of supply.
The ORTEX short score reinforces the low-conviction picture. A reading of 26.5 places this ETF firmly in the lower half of the universe on short-side interest, and the score has barely moved across the past two weeks — drifting between 26.5 and 27.1 with no directional conviction either way. This is a product that attracts occasional tactical short positioning, likely hedging flows against broader EM exposure elsewhere, rather than any dedicated fundamental short thesis.
Price action has been quietly constructive. The fund closed at €74.83, up roughly 4.7% over the past month and 1.9% on the week. That is a steady, unspectacular drift that mirrors improving sentiment toward emerging markets broadly — no single session has driven the move, and there is nothing in the positioning data to suggest the gains are under pressure from rebuilding shorts.
The dividend history is now materially stale — the last recorded payment dates to November 2021 — so any income-oriented framing of this ETF should be treated with caution until updated data is available.
What to watch: the cost-to-borrow will be worth monitoring for any renewed spike back toward the 6–9% range that characterised July, which would signal fresh hedging demand against the EM allocation this fund represents.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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