AIRR — the First Trust RBA American Industrial Renaissance ETF — enters mid-May with a short-interest spike that looks more tactical than structural, sitting against a backdrop of improving one-month price performance.
The headline number is eye-catching: short interest jumped more than 215% over the past week, and is up more than 340% over the past month. In absolute terms, however, this remains a very minor story. Short interest as a percentage of free float is just 0.30% — an ETF with this kind of thin short base simply doesn't carry the same implications as a heavily shorted individual name. The spike reflects a burst of activity earlier in the week (shares short hit a 30-day peak of roughly 316,500 on May 7), before pulling back sharply on May 12. What's visible in the history is a choppy, high-frequency pattern — the kind associated with ETF arbitrage mechanics rather than a directional bear thesis building against the fund's holdings.
The borrowing market reflects that same ETF character. Cost to borrow is running at 5.35%, a modest one-week rise of roughly 2%, but well within the range it has occupied for the past six weeks. There was a brief dip to 3.78% on May 11, followed by the step-back up on May 12 — a short-lived tightening that resolved quickly. Availability has improved meaningfully from where it was earlier in the year: the 52-week utilization peak touched 100%, but the current reading of roughly 22% means more than three quarters of the lending pool is sitting unused. Borrow conditions are far looser now than at the cycle peak.
Options positioning has shifted slightly more cautious at the margin. The put/call ratio climbed to 0.168 on May 12, above its 20-day average of 0.149 — a z-score of about 1.4, meaning it's elevated but not at an extreme. The 52-week high for the PCR is 0.244, so there is considerably more room to the upside if sentiment genuinely sours. For now, the options market looks modestly more hedged than usual, not alarmed.
The ORTEX short score of 37.2 on May 12 is down from a recent peak near 44 reached on May 6 — a meaningful retreat within a short window. That decline aligns with the unwinding of the short-interest spike and the loosening availability. Combined with the fund's 7.5% gain over the past month and only a modest 1% slip on the week, the picture is one of a fund that absorbed some tactical short pressure and is now seeing that pressure dissipate. The most recent dividend of $0.0668 was declared in late March, continuing the fund's pattern of modest income distributions.
What to watch: whether the short-interest volatility — which has now cycled through multiple large swings in just six weeks — stabilises, or whether a fresh round of creation/redemption activity in AIRR's underlying industrial holdings drives another spike as sector rotation themes develop through the second quarter.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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