The lending market for MLGO (MicroAlgo Inc.) has reached a critical inflection point. Availability has collapsed to 2.5%. Cost to borrow has jumped nearly 300% in a single week.
On May 15, MLGO's cost to borrow hit 109% annualised. One week earlier it sat at 22%. That is a 396% rise in seven days.
Availability tells the same story. Just 2.5% of borrowed shares remain available to lend — meaning roughly one share sits free for every 40 already on loan. That is near the 52-week floor of 0.66%.
Short interest rose 11.4% week-on-week to approximately 530,000 shares. The direction is clear: more shorts are piling in even as the pool of borrowable shares shrinks.
The ORTEX short score sits at 66.8 — and has been climbing steadily all month, up from 65.1 on May 6. The utilization rank places MLGO in the top 3% of all stocks screened by this metric. The DTC rank is in the top 7%.
Days to cover stands at 5.93, based on FINRA's most recent fortnightly figure. That means shorts would need roughly six days of average volume to fully unwind. At current borrow costs of 109%, holding a short position here is expensive.
The history of availability over the past month paints a volatile picture. Availability briefly touched 0.66% in mid-April before recovering to around 10% in early May. It has now collapsed again.
| Date | Cost to Borrow | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 13 | 17.7% | 6.6% |
| Apr 17 | 19.5% | 0.9% |
| May 6 | 21.1% | 5.4% |
| May 13 | 26.0% | 10.2% |
| May 14 | 27.6% | 7.5% |
| May 15 | 109.0% | 2.5% |
The jump from May 14 to May 15 — 27.6% to 109% overnight — is the sharpest single-day move in the dataset.
MLGO is a small-cap Nasdaq-listed AI software company. Its tiny float makes it structurally vulnerable to borrow-market dislocations. When short demand concentrates on a limited share base, availability collapses fast and CTB spikes hard.
The stock is up 19.6% over the past month and closed at $4.34 on May 15. That price appreciation — combined with rising short interest — is exactly the environment where borrow costs spike. Existing shorts face mark-to-market losses and rising carry costs simultaneously.
Peers BBAI and CSAI are both down on the week, suggesting MLGO's relative strength is not a sector-wide move. That divergence sharpens the lens on MLGO-specific positioning.
Three signals converging here: short interest rising, availability near zero, cost to borrow at 109%. The 52-week availability floor is 0.66% — if that level is breached again, borrow conditions will be the tightest on record for this stock.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open MLGO 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.
