HDB — HDFC Bank's US-listed ADR — is closing April with an unusual tension: short interest nearly doubled over a single week while price has held remarkably steady, the ADR closing Wednesday at $25.26, down just 3.2% on the week.
The most striking development in positioning is the sharp jump in reported short shares. Estimated short interest rose roughly 70% in the week to April 28, climbing from around 7.9 million shares to 13.4 million. That move happened almost entirely on April 24, when shorts jumped from ~7.9 million to ~13.4 million in a single step — more consistent with a reclassification or a block of ADR creation being lent into the market than an organic wave of new bearish conviction. The FINRA fortnightly figure, with a settlement date of April 15, puts the number at 13.4 million shares at 1.52 days to cover, which is very low. Availability in the borrow market remains extraordinarily loose — utilisation barely registers at 0.78%, well below the 52-week peak of 23.38% — meaning there is no meaningful squeeze risk and the lending pool is far from strained.
Cost to borrow is the one number that points in the same direction as the short-share count. At 0.42% annualised, it has more than doubled over the past month and risen around 67% in one week. Even so, in absolute terms 0.42% is negligibly cheap — it was at similar levels as recently as mid-April, having spiked and retreated several times this month. The pattern is noisy enough that the directional signal is weak. Options positioning adds more weight to the cautious read: the put/call ratio has climbed to 0.62, running about 1.5 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.45. That shift is notable — the PCR was running below 0.37 through early April, and the step-change higher around April 17-20 maps closely to the timing of the Q4 earnings event and the short-interest jump. Together, they describe investors buying more downside protection than they were a fortnight ago, even if the overall level is not extreme.
The April 18 earnings release provides the clearest context for the week's repositioning. The Q4 result produced a one-day move of -3.4% and a five-day follow-through of -6.5%, a sharper reaction than the earlier April 21 data point (-1.8% / -4.6%). That the stock is only down 3.2% on the week — and has actually recovered 3.7% over the past month — suggests the market absorbed the earnings disappointment without a sustained breakdown. The ORTEX short score remains subdued at 27.4, broadly unchanged over the past two weeks, and the EPS momentum factor scores are among the strongest in the universe (97th percentile on 30-day EPS momentum, 94th on 90-day), highlighting that forward-estimate revisions are still running constructively despite the post-earnings softness in price.
Institutional ownership adds a layer of structural stability. The register is anchored by large domestic and international holders: JPMorgan's custody books alone show 13.4% of shares, SBI Funds added 19.8 million shares in Q1 2026, BlackRock added 18.6 million, and several Indian domestic asset managers — ICICI Prudential, HDFC AMC, Kotak — were all net buyers in the March quarter. That breadth of incremental buying from both global and domestic accounts argues against any broad institutional retreat.
Analyst data for the US-listed ADR is materially stale — the most recent coverage change in the dataset is a JP Morgan downgrade to Neutral from July 2024, and the mean price target of $80 reflects an old data point that does not reconcile with the current $25 ADR price, almost certainly a currency or listing-convention mismatch. It should be disregarded. What to watch next: the Q1 FY2027 results are flagged for July 17, and the trajectory of India's banking liquidity environment — flagged this week in domestic coverage as a key variable for earnings recovery — will be the framing context when that date approaches.
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