Rumble shorts are paying 131.5% APR to maintain positions. That's up 739% in a single week — and every available share in the lending pool is gone.
The numbers tell a clear story. Cost to borrow sat at roughly 10% through most of March. It crept to 16–19% in mid-April. Then on April 27 it exploded to 131.5%. The move happened against a backdrop of zero availability — the borrow market has been completely exhausted for most of the past month.
Availability has hit 0%. Every share in the lending pool is currently lent out. That's the tightest the borrow market has been at any point in the past 52 weeks.
Cost to borrow confirms the squeeze. At 131.5% APR, short sellers are now paying more than the stock's entire price annually just to hold their position. A month ago, that figure was around 10.5%. The 1-month change is +1,153%.
This kind of CTB spike — from single digits to triple digits in under two weeks — signals that new borrows are nearly impossible to source. Existing shorts face mounting carry costs.
Despite the cost, short sellers added to positions. SI hit 13.4% of free float on April 27. That's up 10.6% week-on-week — roughly 2.8 million additional shares sold short over the past five days.
Days to cover stands at 18.1 days, based on the latest FINRA fortnightly data. That is an exceptionally long unwind window for a stock trading at these volumes.
The ORTEX short score sits at 89.2. It ranked in the bottom 1st percentile for both DTC and utilization across the universe.
Options positioning cuts the other way. The put/call ratio stands at 0.203 — near its 52-week low of 0.184 and well below the 20-day mean of 0.333. The PCR z-score is -1.38.
Options traders are skewing heavily to calls. That's the opposite direction from the short sellers building positions in the equity lending market. The divergence between these two positioning signals is notable.
Rumble reports next on May 13. The last two earnings prints moved the stock sharply: -11.5% on March 5 and -2.5% on March 25. Short sellers building into a 131.5% CTB environment ahead of an earnings date are taking on significant carry risk for a two-week hold.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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