Some investors are betting the worst is yet to come for Brazil's stock market, even after a brutal selloff last week.
Fund managers said troubles for Brazilian President Michel Temer, who was caught on tape discussing a hush-money arrangement to buy the silence of imprisoned former house speaker Eduardo Cunha, are likely just beginning, and could derail efforts to reform Brazil's pension system, moves aimed at cutting public debt and boosting economic growth.
Brazil's benchmark Bovespa stock index tumbled nearly 9 percent on May 18 after news of the tape surfaced, notching its biggest one-day drop since the depths of the financial crisis in October 2008.
Short sellers descended on funds containing Brazilian shares on the belief they have further to fall.
About 12 percent of shares of the $5.6 billion U.S.-listed iShares MSCI Brazil Capped ETF are being shorted, according to S3 Partners, a financial analytics firm. The fund ranks as the second-most shorted country ETF in the United States by dollar value of short interest.
Investors who take short positions sell borrowed stock they hope to buy back later at lower prices to reimburse the lenders, pocketing the difference.
The Brazil ETF pulled in $526 million of new money in the week ended on Wednesday, according to Thomson Reuters' Lipper research unit, but those figures include shares
created so they could be sold short.
"As EWZ's stock price dropped, short sellers needed to short more stock in order to keep their risk positions at the same levels," said S3 Partners managing director of research Ihor Dusaniwsky.
EWZ's short sellers have a 9 percent profit since last Thursday, he said, with most of that made the day of the big selloff.
To be sure, some of the fund's inflows could also be from investors betting that the recent selloff does not reflect fundamentals underpinning the market.