INFY enters the final stretch before its June 23 earnings with a borrow market that has meaningfully reopened — but the lending pool is nowhere near comfortable, and the stock's week-long rally has now run into its first significant daily pullback.
The clearest development this week is the continued thaw in availability. After spending the better part of six weeks locked near zero — the most extreme closure documented in the lending pool all year — availability has risen to 13.7% of short interest. That means roughly one share is now available for every seven currently borrowed. It is a genuine improvement from the near-total freeze that persisted through most of May, but it remains firmly in tight territory: anything below 50% is a restricted borrow environment, and availability averaged well below 1% for almost the entire period from late April through late May. The cost to borrow mirrors this partial thaw. At approximately 23.7% APR, the rate has retreated from its peak of 28.8% on May 20 but remains elevated versus the 20–21% range that prevailed in mid-April. The borrow market has loosened at the margin — it has not normalised.
Short interest itself has been drifting quietly lower through this period, a pattern that warrants a separate read. After peaking at 4.59% of free float on May 19, gross SI has declined in small but consistent steps to 4.45% by June 2. That is still a meaningful short position for a large-cap IT services name, but the direction of travel matters: shorts have been covering, not adding, even as borrow conditions remained tight and the ADR rallied nearly 9% across five sessions. The divergence between a shrinking short base and a still-restricted lending pool is the defining tension in the positioning picture right now.
The ORTEX composite score has picked up momentum at exactly the right moment. The total score reached 79.2 on June 2-3, its highest reading in at least a month. The improvement was almost entirely driven by the momentum pillar, which jumped to 48.8 from readings in the low-to-mid 40s through most of May. Quality remains the standout anchor at 88.6, consistent with the company's high return-on-assets and low financial distress risk. Growth continues to lag at 58.8, weighed down by negative forward EPS revisions — a persistent soft spot that has kept the score from reaching the mid-80s. The dividend score ranks in the 99th percentile, though the most recent dividend data in the snapshot dates to 2022 and reflects INR-denominated payouts from the Indian-listed entity rather than the ADR.
The next print on June 23 brings the most relevant near-term reference point into focus. The April 23 results showed the stock dropped 3.2% on the day and 6.5% over the following five sessions — a consistent pattern of modest but sustained post-earnings selling. That reaction came despite what a recent ORTEX note described as stronger-than-expected Q1 FY27 margins and mid-single-digit revenue guidance. The market's response to a broadly positive print was still negative, which tells you something about where expectations were set going in. With availability still restricted and shorts having already partially covered into the rally, the June 23 setup will be shaped by whether the remaining short base has enough conviction — and enough available borrow — to rebuild positions if the print disappoints.
The watch for the coming two weeks is whether availability continues to loosen toward the 30–50% range, or snaps back toward zero as new short positions compete for a still-scarce lending pool. Any meaningful retreat in availability would push borrow costs back toward the late-May peak and tighten the conditions facing both new entrants and existing holders looking to roll their borrow.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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