GLD enters this week with an interesting divergence: the price of gold has slipped, but short sellers are moving in the opposite direction — quietly rebuilding positions abandoned during April's gold rally.
Short interest in the SPDR Gold Shares ETF climbed roughly 12% over the past week, reaching ~9.9 million shares. That follows a more dramatic retreat: positions fell nearly 20% over the previous month as gold ripped to its highs. The partial rebuild is notable. It puts shorts back near the levels seen in mid-April, before the big unwind that drove positions down to ~8.1 million shares on April 22. Whether this reflects renewed conviction on the short side, or simply hedging activity from institutions managing gold exposure across funds, is the central question in the borrow market right now.
The borrow picture tells a more pointed story. Cost to borrow on GLD jumped 48% over the past week, reaching 0.58% annualised. That's up sharply from the 0.33% briefly recorded on May 4. More telling is the availability reading: shares available relative to outstanding short interest have compressed to around 157% — down from above 500% in late April, when the gold rally had cleared out shorts and left the borrow pool relatively unused. A reading of 157% is in "tight" territory; there are roughly 1.5 shares available for every 1 currently borrowed. That's meaningfully different from the loose conditions seen just two weeks ago, and it explains why borrow costs are rising. The lending market is absorbing renewed short demand, and the pool isn't unlimited.
Options traders are telling a less bearish story. The put/call ratio on GLD eased to 0.59, about 1.1 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.61. That's a modest tilt toward calls — not extreme, but directionally consistent with investors still expecting gold to recover. The PCR has spent most of the past six weeks clustered between 0.58 and 0.64; the current reading is at the lower end of that range, suggesting no panic in the options market and no aggressive hedging against further downside. The 52-week put/call range runs from 0.39 to 0.80, so the current reading sits comfortably in the middle — neither a crowded bull signal nor a defensive posture.
GLD's ORTEX short score sits at 48.2, up from 39.3 in late April. The move from the low 40s back toward the mid-40s tracks the short interest rebuild closely and confirms that the directional signal has shifted over the past two weeks. It's not a high reading in absolute terms — the mid-point for the 0–100 scale — but the trajectory matters. Three weeks ago, positions were unwinding and the score was falling. Now both are reversing. On price, GLD closed at $418.27, down about 0.9% on the week and 2.6% over the past month, as gold gave back some of its extraordinary first-quarter gains.
Analyst and valuation data for GLD are not applicable in any meaningful sense — this is a physically-backed ETF tracking gold prices, not a company with earnings or price targets. The top institutional holders, led by Morgan Stanley with just under 3.7% of shares, are largely wealth management platforms and broker-dealers using GLD as a liquid gold proxy for client portfolios. BlackRock added ~853,000 shares as of March 31, while UBS Asset Management trimmed ~1.1 million. Neither move looks like a directional conviction trade; they reflect the routine portfolio rebalancing typical of large custodians.
What to watch next is straightforward: whether the borrow market continues to tighten from here. Availability at 157% leaves room for shorts to keep building before the lending pool becomes genuinely constrained, but the direction of travel over the past two weeks has been consistently toward tighter conditions — and cost to borrow is already reacting. If gold prices stabilise or recover, the shorts rebuilding now will face a test, and a rapid unwind could push availability even wider. For now, positioning looks cautious rather than aggressive: shorts rebuilding modestly, options leaning slightly constructive, and the borrow market tightening but not yet stressed.
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