ICLN availability collapsed to just 1% on June 1 — the tightest the lending pool has been in a year. At the same time, options traders turned sharply bullish, pushing the put/call ratio to a 52-week low.
The two signals rarely align this cleanly.
Availability fell from 36% on May 29 to 1% on June 1. That is a 94% tightening in a single week. Every share in the lending pool is effectively already lent out.
Cost to borrow has climbed alongside. It now stands at 4.5% APR — up 43% over the past month. The borrow market has tightened even as short interest itself has fallen sharply.
That combination matters. Short interest dropped 22% week-over-week to 6.6% of float. Yet availability is near zero. Fewer shorts are in the trade, but what remains has consumed almost all available supply.
The put/call ratio hit 0.30 on June 1. That is the lowest reading in 52 weeks. The 20-day average sits at 0.67. The current reading is 2.3 standard deviations below that mean.
The shift is abrupt. The PCR held near 0.79 through most of May. It broke sharply lower in the final week of the month and kept falling.
Call volume is now dominating the options market by a wide margin. Traders are buying upside exposure, not protection.
Short interest has been falling steadily. It peaked near 10.4 million shares in mid-May and has roughly halved since. Some of that unwinding looks like deliberate covering.
But the borrow squeeze arriving precisely as shorts exit is unusual. When availability drops to 1%, remaining short positions face real friction to stay in. Any forced covering amplifies upward price pressure — and call buyers would benefit directly.
The price tells a similar story. ICLN is up 10% over the past month, closing at $23.04 on June 1. The ORTEX short score sits at 56.6, easing from a recent high of 61.4 on May 25.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ICLN 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.
