ORTEX

What it is

A short-side data platform. The number it is bought for is an estimate of short interest computed daily and intraday from securities-lending inventory — what brokers and agent lenders report having lent out — rather than from the exchanges' own twice-monthly filing. Around it sit cost to borrow on both the whole book and new loans, short availability, days to cover, a short score, and the official reported figures where regulators publish them.

The reason the estimate exists is the reason this category has a job called short interest at all. The official US figure is published twice a month with a week's delay, which is close to useless for a position that moves daily. An estimate from the lending pool is available every morning and is wrong in different ways — it sees loans rather than short positions, and it sees only the lenders who report.

ORTEX also carries a full equity platform around the short data: live pricing for US, European and UK equities, an options chain with greeks and flow, a news feed, screeners over every dataset it holds, and a backtester that runs a screen's rules against history and then alerts on live data.

Pricing

Two separate purchases, and the relationship between them is the one thing the vendor's own pages do not agree on.

The platform is $49 a month for Basic and $149 for Advanced, dropping to $39 and $99 a month if billed annually. The pricing table prints monthly-equivalent figures in each currency and never an annual total. Where the line falls matters more than the price: the official, delayed short interest is a Basic feature, and the live and intraday estimate — the thing people subscribe for — is Advanced.

The API is sold as its own four tiers, at $49, $149 and $499 a month plus a contact-priced Enterprise, rationed by monthly credits (1,000, 10,000, 100,000) and by rate limit (1, 5 and 50 requests a second). Trader excludes intraday short interest, bulk and universe endpoints entirely. A trial key is published — the literal string TEST, which returns randomly selected rows.

Data & coverage

Estimated short interest, daily by 07:30 ET and live from 07:00 ET through 05:00 ET the next day, from what ORTEX describes as the largest combined pool of agent lenders, prime brokers and broker-dealers submitting inventory. Official reported short interest for the US, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, with settlement date, published date, average daily volume and days to cover. Cost to borrow, split between all loans and new loans, which is the split that tells you whether a squeeze is old or forming. Short availability. And regulator-disclosed named short positions under the European 0.5% threshold regime and its Japanese equivalent, added as the regulator publishes them.

Fails-to-deliver appear on the web platform but no fails-to-deliver endpoint is listed in the API docs, so treat that dataset as screen-only until the vendor says otherwise.

Integrations

The widest surface in this category: a REST API, a Python SDK, a native Excel add-in and a first-party MCP server. Each API response reports its own credit usage, page sizes run from 100 to 10,000 rows by tier, and credits reset on the renewal date rather than the calendar month.

Limitations

• The headline number is an estimate, not a filing. It infers short interest from lending inventory, which is a good proxy and not the same quantity. Any claim it makes is unfalsifiable until the official figure lands a fortnight later.
• The free tier is undocumented. No feature list anywhere, so the only way to learn what it allows is to create an account.
• Platform and API pricing may or may not overlap — the vendor's homepage and its checkout disagree, and nothing published resolves it.
• No redistribution on any published tier. Enterprise only.
• Official short interest covers four countries — the US, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. The European and Japanese data is threshold disclosures of named positions, which is a different thing and not a market-wide figure.
• No fails-to-deliver through the API, despite the dataset appearing on the platform.

Alternatives

ChartExchange is the cheap opposite: the official FINRA figure, fails to deliver and Interactive Brokers' borrow fee, sold à la carte from $19.95 a month with a real API and no estimate at all. iBorrowDesk gives one broker's borrow fee and availability free. S3 Partners is the institutional competitor on the same estimate, sold only by contract. Fintel folds short interest into an ownership product at consumer prices. For the free official source under all of them, FINRA publishes the semi-monthly file itself. The rest of the category is at insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers.