JETS short sellers, who covered aggressively earlier this month, have quietly rebuilt positions — and the borrow market is now tighter than at any point since that covering episode.
The previous note published earlier today described a "squeeze paradox": short interest had fallen sharply while availability remained tight and cost to borrow rose. That picture has shifted. Short interest has crept back up — from roughly 12.6 million shares on May 12 to 12.9 million on May 19, a 1.3% rise over the week. More striking is what has happened to availability. It has collapsed from 26.5% last Tuesday to just 5.9% today, meaning fewer than one share remains borrowable for every sixteen already out on loan. That is the tightest the borrow market has been since early April, when availability briefly touched near-zero before the covering wave began.
The cost to borrow has risen alongside that tightening. It is running at 7.76% APR, up 24% on the week — a level that makes entering a fresh short position meaningfully more expensive than it was a fortnight ago. Bears are paying a higher carry to maintain existing positions and an even higher cost to establish new ones. Against a backdrop of 47.2% of float already short, the arithmetic of adding more exposure is increasingly punishing.
Options positioning has moved in the opposite direction, and the contrast is worth naming. The put/call ratio has dropped to 2.87, nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 3.33 and well off the 52-week high of 3.81 hit just last week. That is the least defensive options reading in weeks. With the broad PCR still historically elevated in absolute terms — puts still outnumber calls by nearly three to one — this is less a signal of outright optimism and more a reduction in the intensity of bearish hedging. Options traders are pulling back from peak defensiveness at the precise moment the borrow market is tightening again.
The ORTEX short score of 72.8 reinforces the overall picture: this remains a heavily shorted instrument, with a score that has been remarkably stable in the low-70s throughout May. The score reflects the sustained weight of positioning rather than a sudden escalation. Price action tells its own story — JETS has shed 5.6% over the past week and 11.1% over the past month, closing at $24.81. That decline has not triggered meaningful covering; if anything, the slight uptick in short shares and the dramatic tightening of availability suggest the remaining bears are digging in.
What to watch is whether availability stays in single digits or tightens further toward the near-zero readings seen earlier this year — that level, when it last appeared, preceded the aggressive covering wave that briefly shook the positioning picture.
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