The bears who piled into EWC through August and early September are now pulling back — and the pace of that unwind mirrors the pace of the original build.
Short interest has fallen meaningfully from its recent peak. It dropped 3% on the week to roughly 2.86 million shares, or 4.4% of the free float — down from the 5%-plus reading that drove the previous note a week ago. The month-on-month figure still shows a 7% net gain, so shorts haven't abandoned the thesis entirely, but the direction has clearly shifted. That retreat coincides with a price that has stopped falling: EWC closed at $60.76, up 0.8% on the week and essentially flat on the day. The stock is still down 2.6% over the past month, but the bleeding has slowed.
The borrow market reinforces that picture of easing pressure. Cost to borrow has dropped sharply — down 12% on the week and 30% over the past month — to just 0.35%, its lowest reading in the 30-day window. Availability is exceptionally loose at 1,388%, meaning there are nearly fourteen shares available to borrow for every one currently out on loan. For context, the tightest this lending pool has been in the past year was around 20% availability — the current setup is nowhere near that. The ORTEX short score has also drifted lower, falling from 38.4 on September 11 to 35.3 now, consistent with a positioning environment that is becoming less bearish rather than more charged.
Options positioning offers little drama. The put/call ratio is running at 7.05, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average of 7.05, and the z-score is negligible at -0.15. For an ETF with structurally high put open interest, that flatness is itself informative — there is no incremental hedging demand building ahead of any near-term catalyst.
On the ownership side, the most notable development in recent filings is BlackRock Portfolio Management's Schedule 13G/A from June, which disclosed a stake that nearly doubled — from 10.1% to 19.7% of the class. FMR LLC separately crossed the 5% threshold in August. Both are passive filings, carrying no activist intent, and the standard caveat applies: these stakes are as-last-disclosed around the 5% reporting threshold, and holders can fall below without further disclosure. Still, the concentration of ownership — BlackRock Inc. holds 25% of shares per the institutional register, and JPMorgan a further 16% — is a reminder that flows in this ETF are driven heavily by a small number of large systematic allocators rather than by discretionary stock-pickers.
What to watch next is whether the short-interest decline continues toward the August lows near 2.5 million shares, or whether bears rebuild again on any renewed weakness in the Canadian dollar or commodity complex — the two macro variables that tend to drive the gap between EWC and broader North American equity benchmarks.
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