136 — China Ruyi Holdings — enters the week with its first meaningful shift in the lending market in over a month: availability has doubled off its floor, the stock bounced 11% on Thursday, and yet the short score remains deep in the danger zone.
The change in the borrow market is real, but it needs context. Availability has climbed to 33% from the 8% reading flagged in the September 2 note — roughly three shares now available for every ten already borrowed, compared with one-in-twelve just days ago. Cost to borrow has also retreated sharply, falling 53% on the week to 29% from the 60%-plus levels seen at the August 28 peak. Both moves point to partial short covering: short interest has dropped nearly 10% over the past month to around 1.98 billion shares, and the ORTEX short score has eased from 96.8 — the high flagged in the August 29 note — to 94.7. That is still an extreme reading. A score near 95 ranks in the top few percent of the global universe for short-side stress. The pressure has moderated; it has not lifted. The 52-week low for availability remains 7.5%, and conditions in late August came within a whisker of retesting it. The current 33% level is tight, not comfortable.
The stock is navigating all of this from a weakened price position. Thursday's 11% single-day bounce to HK$1.365 is the most eye-catching move of the week, but it follows a month that has taken shares down 7% and a week that still closes roughly 5% lower overall. The August 28 earnings release landed badly — the stock fell 6.6% on the day and shed a further 5.2% over the following five sessions. Prior results showed a similar pattern: a 2.7% drop in May after the previous print. Every recent earnings event has punished the stock. The analyst mean price target is HK$2.50, nearly double Thursday's close, though with no recent analyst changes on file the target's freshness is hard to gauge.
The institutional register carries one genuinely notable data point this week. BlackRock added 166 million shares through August, lifting its stake to 3.4% of the company — the largest active change in the holder list. That move runs directly against the short-side consensus. Krane Funds Advisors cut its position by 127 million shares around the same time, a meaningful trim. The two moves together suggest the institutional community is not uniformly bearish: a major passive and active manager is building while a specialist EM fund reduces. The two largest holders — Liming Ke and Tencent Holdings, together controlling roughly 31% of shares — have reported no change, leaving a concentrated base that limits freely tradeable supply and amplifies lending tightness when shorts are active.
Peers on the mainland have generally had a better week. Stocks like 603258 on Shanghai and 300299 on Shenzhen gained 7–5% respectively, while 136 closed the week lower despite Thursday's rally. The divergence underscores what the prior notes identified: Ruyi's weakness is stock-specific, not sector-wide, and correlated names are not providing the floor that might otherwise cushion a positioning unwind.
What to watch next is whether Thursday's bounce holds and whether availability continues to recover from its near-annual low — a sustained move above 50% would meaningfully change the structural short pressure that has defined this stock for the past six weeks.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open 136 on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
