EWC — the iShares MSCI Canada ETF — is flashing a sharper bearish signal this week than at any point in the past month, with short interest jumping almost 95% in a single session even as the ETF slips back toward $58.
The short-side move is the week's defining story. Short interest hit 11.4% of the free float on June 9, up from 6.9% just a week ago — a 39% weekly rise that builds directly on the rebuild documented in the prior note. The most striking element is the single-session doubling: positions jumped from roughly 3.85 million shares on June 8 to 7.51 million on June 9 — the largest one-day surge in the 30-day window by a wide margin. The ORTEX short score jumped to 54.8 on June 9, up from 43.3 the day before, a 27% intraday swing that pushed the score to its highest reading in the dataset. That combination — position size doubling and score accelerating on the same day — is not a gradual drift higher. It reads as a deliberate re-engagement by short sellers at a moment when the ETF is giving back its early-June gains.
The borrow market has not closed the door on further shorting, but it has tightened at the margin. Availability has eased to around 397% of estimated short interest, down from 434% on June 8, while the cost to borrow has climbed to 1.04% — its highest level in the 30-day window and up roughly 6% on the week. The 52-week peak availability reading was 88.98% utilization (i.e., close to fully used), and current conditions remain well short of that stress level. Borrow is still accessible, but the trend is moving in one direction. That matters because it means the short-side is not yet running into a wall of friction — there is still room for positions to grow before the lending pool becomes a constraint. Options positioning adds a softer counterpoint: the put/call ratio at 5.86 is actually running below its 20-day average of 6.35, with a z-score of -1.51. Options traders, in other words, are slightly less defensive than they have been for most of the past month, even as outright short sellers are adding aggressively.
Institutional ownership provides useful context on who holds the other side of this trade. BlackRock, as the fund's issuer-affiliated entity, holds 23.9% of shares. JPMorgan has 15.4%. Manulife and RBC Rochdale together account for another 11%. These are largely structural, index-replication or distribution holders — not momentum players likely to capitulate quickly. RBC Rochdale added 2.3 million shares through March 31, the largest percentage-basis addition in the top-holder list, which may reflect Canadian-dollar hedging flows as much as any directional view. The concentration of ownership in institutional hands with long-only mandates does provide a degree of stability to the float, even as the short-side rebuilds.
What to watch next is straightforward: whether June 9's doubling of short interest proves a one-session event that reverses — as June 1's spike to 5.3 million shares partially did — or whether it consolidates at the new higher level through the rest of the week, which would confirm a genuine structural shift in conviction rather than tactical intraday repositioning.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open EWC 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.
