MOO, the VanEck Agribusiness ETF, closed the week at $87.43 — up 3% on the week and nearly 7% over the past month — with the defensive options hedge that dominated last week's note now largely unwound.
The options reversal is the clearest change since the previous note. A week ago, MOO's put/call ratio had spiked to 0.20, more than four standard deviations above its 20-day average — an extraordinary burst of hedging activity against a rising fund. That protection has now been removed. The PCR collapsed to 0.047, sitting 1.2 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.069. In practical terms, the options market has flipped from unusually defensive to unusually light on downside cover, all while the ETF continued to grind higher. The 52-week PCR low is 0.013, so there is room to fall further, but the current reading is among the most call-heavy of the past year.
Borrow conditions corroborate the relaxed tone. Availability remains comfortable at roughly 243% — meaning more than twice as many shares sit available to lend as are currently borrowed — though that figure has tightened sharply from the 570–3,700% range that defined most of August. Short interest has swung around noisily this week: the daily estimate jumped 46% on September 1 to 280,000 shares, yet the week-on-week reading is still 26%, and the overall level at 3.5% of float remains modest. The cost to borrow is low at 0.57% and has eased 8% over the week. The ORTEX short score ticked up to 42 from a mid-30s range earlier in the week, reflecting the day-over-day SI jump, but the borrow market overall reads as relaxed rather than stressed. The 52-week availability low of 1.7% — hit at some point in the past year — is a reminder that conditions can tighten dramatically; today's setup is nowhere near that extreme.
Institutional positioning is broadly steady. The two largest holders as of June 30 were 1832 Asset Management with roughly 4% of shares and Morgan Stanley with 3.7%, the latter having added 163,000 shares over the quarter — a meaningful build. LPL Financial trimmed 57,000 shares over the same period. Neither move is large enough to shift the fund's ownership story materially, and with 141 institutional holders the register is well-distributed. Dividend data is stale — the last recorded distribution was in December 2021 — so income-focused comparisons are not possible from this snapshot.
The week ahead leaves the ETF trading near its best levels in months, with options positioning now notably call-light and borrow conditions comfortable but tightening at the margin. What to watch: whether the short interest volatility — which has swung between 130,000 and 380,000 shares daily across August — settles or whether another spike reshapes the borrow picture, and whether the unusually low PCR persists as the fund tests higher ground.
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