Options positioning in VOO is about as bullish as it has been all year — and that alone makes this week worth watching.
The clearest signal came from Tuesday's options flow. The put/call ratio collapsed to 0.66, the lowest reading of the past 52 weeks and more than 2.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.49. That is a dramatic one-session reversal from Monday's reading of 1.89, itself the 52-week high. In a single trading day, options positioning swung from maximum defensiveness to maximum aggression. The swing is the story, not the level.
That options signal runs alongside a decent week for the fund itself. VOO added 2% over the past five sessions to close at $678.67, recovering ground after an 8.7% gain over the past month that traces the broader market's bounce from April's tariff-driven selloff. The short-interest picture confirms the market's improving mood: estimated shorts fell to under 0.4% of the float — negligible for an index ETF of this scale, and down sharply from the roughly 0.7% level that prevailed during the most volatile days in early April. With borrow costs running at just 0.20% annualised and availability extremely loose, the lending market shows no sign of pressure in either direction.
The April history is worth noting explicitly. Short interest in VOO roughly doubled between late March and April 3rd, as the tariff shock hit the tape hard. From April 7 onwards it unwound almost as quickly, retreating back to normal ETF levels as the S&P recovered. Cost to borrow moved in the opposite direction — spiking toward 0.74% in early April before halving back. That sequence illustrates how short activity in VOO functions less as structural conviction and more as tactical hedging that gets added and removed quickly around macro dislocations.
On the ownership side, the institutional base is broad and stable. California Public Employees' Retirement System reported 33.6 million shares as recently as March 31, adding over 2 million in the quarter. Envestnet added 4.2 million shares in the same period. The notable move from the prior year was Royal Bank of Canada, which added roughly 17.6 million shares in the year to December 2025 — a substantial build for a single firm in an ETF with 255 reported institutional holders. Capula Management also appeared as a new holder, reporting 11.9 million shares at year-end after holding none previously. These moves speak to the fund's role as a core allocation vehicle rather than a trading instrument.
What to watch next is whether Tuesday's extreme call-side tilt in options is a one-day aberration tied to a specific macro catalyst — such as trade-related headlines — or the start of a sustained shift in hedging behaviour. The 52-week low PCR reading on the same day the 52-week high was set just 24 hours earlier is a compression of sentiment that rarely sustains itself; the next few sessions will show whether the defensive bid returns or whether the options market continues to price a one-way upside path.
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VOO heads into the first full week of May with its most striking data point not in the lending market — where short interest remains negligible — but in options, where positioning has undergone a dramatic one-session…
