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BALY enters the second week of October with a borrow market that has gone from tight to extreme, while the stock itself has quietly more than doubled from its August lows, creating a charged standoff between shorts paying triple-digit rates to hold positions and a price chart that has moved firmly against them.
The lending story is the sharpest angle here. Availability has tightened dramatically over the past six weeks, with the borrow pool nearly locked shut through most of September. Availability fell as low as 0.01% in late August and held in that near-zero range through September 22. It has since loosened to around 22%, which sounds like relief but still leaves most of the lending pool already deployed. The cost to borrow tells the same story in different terms. CTB has spiked from roughly 7% in late August to 130% today, with a brief spike to 239% on October 5. That is a more than twentyfold increase in six weeks, making BALY one of the most expensive borrows in the US gaming sector. Shorts holding positions are paying an annualised rate well above 100% just to stay in the trade, a punishing carry against a stock that has risen 53% in the past month.
The ORTEX short score reinforces how extreme the positioning picture has become. BALY scores 93.2 out of 100, placing it in the top tier of short-squeeze candidates across the ORTEX universe. The score has held in the 93 range all week. Factor scores add texture: the days-to-cover rank scores 4 out of 100 and the utilisation rank scores 3, both pointing toward a borrow market where there is little room for new shorts to enter cheaply. Short interest itself has actually dipped about 5% over the past week to roughly 1.24 million shares, suggesting that some bears have already covered rather than continue paying the elevated carry.
The earnings history adds an important dimension to the risk picture. BALY's most recent results, reported in August, produced a 23.6% single-day drop followed by a 24.2% fall over five days. The print before that, in May, also fell on the day by 8.4% before recovering 14% over the following week. No next earnings date is currently flagged, but that August reaction is still fresh for anyone considering a directional position. The options market shows the put/call ratio at 8.5, well below its 20-day average of 20.5, which itself reflects a period when very heavy put positioning was the norm. That ratio hit 62 in mid-September. The current reading sits roughly 0.6 standard deviations below the recent mean, suggesting options traders have dialled back the worst-case hedges even as the borrow market stays expensive.
Ownership is heavily concentrated. Standard General holds 64.4% of shares, essentially turning the remaining float into a thin market. Noel Hayden holds a further 9.8%. Together, those two positions account for roughly three-quarters of the company. That structural thinness in the float likely amplifies both the borrow squeeze and the price moves: with most shares locked up in large, stable holdings, the short sellers are competing over a narrow lending pool. BlackRock added 80,000 shares in the quarter ending September 30, a modest increment but one of the few moves visible in recent filings.
The alt data backdrop adds one cautionary note. Online sports wagering handle in Massachusetts, a market where Bally's competes, has fallen for five consecutive months, with August 2026 running 31% below August 2025. That streak does not feed into any ORTEX-measured revenue lead for BALY specifically, but the direction of travel in one of its key sports-betting geographies is worth keeping alongside the borrow and pricing data as the next earnings date comes into focus.
What to watch next is whether the cost to borrow stabilises below 100% as short interest continues its slow decline, or whether availability tightens again toward the near-zero levels seen in September, reigniting squeeze pressure on a stock that has already moved sharply and where the largest holder controls the float.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open BALY on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
