ULTY has become significantly more expensive to bet against over the past month — and the bears are pressing anyway.
The most striking development is in borrowing costs. Cost to borrow has climbed to 19.5%, nearly double the ~10–11% level seen in mid-April. That 77% monthly surge is not a rounding error — it reflects a meaningful tightening in the supply of lendable shares relative to demand from short sellers. It's a high rate for an ETF, where borrow is typically cheap and abundant.
Short interest tells the same story. The number of shares held short jumped by roughly 34% in a single week — from around 3.2 million on May 7 to over 4.2 million by May 12 — and has held near that elevated level since. ORTEX estimates SI now at close to 16% of the free float, a figure that ranks well above typical ETF short positioning and reflects genuine bearish conviction. The ORTEX short score reinforces that: it leapt from 76.7 on May 8 to 81.7 by May 19, the highest reading in the tracked history and a level that flags this name as among the most heavily shorted in its class.
Borrow availability has eased modestly this week — now at 37% of short interest, up from below 28% at the start of the month — but that remains firmly in tight territory. Less than four shares are available for every ten already borrowed. At its worst over the past year, availability dropped to just 0.1%, and the 52-week high utilization hit 100%. The current setup is not at that extreme, but the direction of short interest growth against a backdrop of limited lendable supply means the cost of maintaining a short position here is not cheap.
Options positioning has been persistently bearish for months. The put/call ratio runs at 1.93, close to its 20-day average of 2.01 — meaning the skew toward puts is not a recent spike but an entrenched structural feature of how this ETF trades in the options market. The z-score of -0.34 shows this week's PCR is just fractionally below that recent mean. There's no fresh escalation from options traders this week, but the baseline defensive lean is notable given the ETF's income-focused investor base.
The fund itself — a YieldMax covered-call strategy that harvests options premium across a basket of high-volatility single-name ETFs — carries an inherent structural tension. Its distributions are high and attract income-seeking holders, but the covered-call overlay caps upside participation when underlying names rally. Short sellers appear focused on that compression dynamic: the fund is down 4% both over the past week and the past month, trading at $30.93. Whether the elevated borrow cost sustains at these levels or forces some position unwinding is the clearest thing to monitor from here.
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