QQQ enters the final day of April with a notable tension at its core: short sellers have been steadily adding to positions even as the fund itself has posted one of its strongest monthly rallies in recent memory.
The price story first. QQQ closed Wednesday at $661.57, up nearly 1% on the week and a remarkable 17.6% on the month — a rebound that reflects the broader recovery in mega-cap tech following tariff-driven volatility in early April. Yet against that backdrop, estimated short interest has been climbing in lockstep, rising 6.3% over the past week and 12.3% over the past month to 10.6% of the ORTEX-adjusted float. That combination — price recovery and rising short interest simultaneously — is the central puzzle this week.
The positioning picture is more nuanced than a headline short figure suggests. Borrow cost is running at 0.61% annualised, its highest level of the past week after jumping nearly 29% over seven days, though it remains well below the spiky readings seen in late March. Availability tells a looser story: the lending market is not under meaningful strain, and nothing in the borrow data suggests a squeeze is imminent. The ORTEX short score has drifted up to 62.5, its highest reading of the 10-day window, rising from 58.7 a week ago — a gentle grind higher, not a sharp inflection. This is a market gradually leaning more cautious on Nasdaq tech exposure, not one making an aggressive directional bet.
Options positioning reinforces that caution. The put/call ratio on QQQ closed at 1.49 — slightly above its 20-day average of 1.46, though the z-score of just 0.59 means the deviation is mild. More telling is the direction of travel: the PCR has been running persistently elevated since mid-April, after spending much of late March near 1.26-1.28. Investors are carrying more downside protection than they were a month ago, even as prices recovered. The 52-week high for the PCR was 1.86, so there is headroom to get more defensive, but the current level already leans toward hedged rather than outright bullish.
On the institutional side, the top holders are a familiar cast of wealth management and prime brokerage names. Morgan Stanley remains the largest reported holder at roughly 2.5% of shares, though it trimmed its position meaningfully in the December 2025 quarter. Bank of America added over 4 million shares in the same period. The divergence between two of the largest holders — one cutting, one adding — reflects the broader market split on whether the AI-driven Nasdaq rally still has legs or has already priced in the recovery. Susquehanna also added nearly 1.9 million shares, consistent with options market-making activity tied to QQQ's deep options franchise.
The week to watch is whether the short rebuild continues as the biggest QQQ names — META, MSFT, AMZN, and GOOGL — digest their earnings prints. Meta's guidance language in particular drew scrutiny today. The pace of short interest growth in QQQ has tracked closely with uncertainty around those mega-cap results; with most of the heavy earnings now behind us, the next signal will be whether short interest stabilises or keeps climbing into a post-earnings market that has, for now, held its ground.
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