Short interest in NVDG — the 2x leveraged NVDA daily ETF — has nearly doubled in a month. Yet options traders are betting hard the other way.
That tension is the story right now.
SI hit 48.6% of free float as of May 15. That's up 33% in a single week and up 261% over the past month. By any measure, short positioning in this ETF is at an extreme.
But the lending market tells a sharply different story. Availability is now essentially uncapped — the data shows 9,999%, meaning shares to borrow are plentiful relative to what's currently on loan. A week ago, availability was far tighter. The sudden loosening suggests a large block of new lendable shares entered the pool, cutting the scarcity that had been driving borrow costs higher.
Cost to borrow reflects that shift. CTB stood at 35.9% as recently as May 7. It has since fallen to 11.8% — a 67% drop in one week. Shorting NVDG has become measurably cheaper even as the short position itself grew.
The put/call ratio tells the opposite story. At 0.0494, it sits 3.8 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.035. That's extreme call dominance. For every put traded, roughly 20 calls changed hands.
This PCR reading is still well below the 52-week high of 0.87 — but the z-score spike means the shift is what stands out. Options participants moved decisively toward calls on May 15, the same day short interest was being logged near multi-month highs.
The ORTEX short score peaked at 77.4 on May 7. It has fallen steadily to 51.4 as of May 14. That's a meaningful reversal. The score incorporates borrow cost, availability, and SI trends — and the recent drop tracks the CTB collapse and the availability loosening precisely.
High SI with a falling short score and collapsing borrow costs is an unusual combination. It points to a positioning structure that may be unstable: shares are heavily shorted, but the mechanics of the borrow market have shifted in ways that make maintaining those positions cheaper and less urgent to cover.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open NVDG on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
