GRID — the First Trust NASDAQ Clean Edge Smart Grid Infrastructure ETF — enters mid-May with a short interest picture that is as volatile as any single-name stock, even as the underlying fund quietly posts a near-10% gain over the past month.
The most striking dynamic here is the sheer whiplash in short positioning. Short interest as a percentage of float reached 1.3% on May 12, having shed nearly half its level in a single week and more than a third in one day — a rapid unwinding after a spike that, over the prior month, lifted the short position by more than 700%. That month-long build peaked around early May at roughly 900,000 shares, before collapsing back toward 400,000. For an ETF, this kind of daily oscillation tends to reflect creation/redemption arbitrage rather than fundamental conviction — but the amplitude is notable.
The borrow market tells a more nuanced story. Cost to borrow has eased from a spike to nearly 13% in late April back to 4.4% — still above where it was in early April, when the rate ran in the low-to-mid 3% range. Availability has loosened alongside the short interest retreat, with the lending pool no longer nearly exhausted. At the peak of the recent squeeze episode — late April — borrow was both expensive and scarce; that pressure has since dissipated meaningfully. The 52-week high on utilization was 94%, against a current reading near 36%, underscoring how much has unwound in the past two weeks.
Options positioning remains calm relative to what the short interest spike might have implied. The put/call ratio sits at 0.32, barely above its 20-day average of 0.30 and well within one standard deviation of normal. That puts it at the lower end of the past year's range — the 52-week high was 0.64 — pointing to a broadly call-heavy options book. Over the past month, the PCR has drifted up from a very low 0.17 in early April toward the current level, a modest normalisation but nothing that signals renewed defensive hedging. Options traders are not positioned for further trouble.
The ORTEX short score has followed the same arc. It hit a local peak above 50 in early May, then retreated to 43 — a mid-range reading that reflects the ebbing of the recent short activity. The combined score at 42.8 places GRID in the middle of the distribution, not a high-conviction short target by current metrics. With no earnings events scheduled and the fund's underlying infrastructure names benefiting from continued policy tailwinds around grid modernisation and clean energy build-out, the most recent $0.10 dividend announced in March adds a modest income layer without moving the needle for short-term positioning.
The setup to watch now is whether the short interest, having reversed so sharply, stabilises at current levels or resumes the kind of erratic swings seen through April and early May — the speed of both the build and the unwind makes this ETF worth monitoring for anyone tracking clean energy sentiment.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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