Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals enters the back half of June with short sellers quietly retreating and the Street turning more constructive — a combination that has helped the stock add 4.4% on the week to $76.55, even as it gave back a fraction on Tuesday.
The short interest story is the clearest signal of a shifting tone. Bears have been cutting exposure steadily. Short interest has fallen 7.7% over the past month to roughly 8.8% of the free float — about 12 million shares — a meaningful pullback from the 13.5 million shares outstanding short in late May. The lending market offers no reason for shorts to panic: availability is extraordinarily loose at over 1,060% of current short interest, meaning there are roughly ten shares available to borrow for every one already lent out. Borrowing costs bear that out, running at just 0.49% — barely above general collateral and largely unchanged on the week, even though they are about 22% higher than a month ago. Options are similarly calm. The put/call ratio at 0.55 is fractionally below its 20-day average and well within one standard deviation of normal, suggesting neither hedgers nor bulls are leaning hard into directional bets right now.
The analyst community has been noticeably more active. This morning, Leerink Partners lifted its target on ARWR from $61 to $72 — still below the current price — while keeping a Market Perform rating, the kind of move that signals growing respect for the pipeline without full capitulation to the bull thesis. That follows a JP Morgan initiation at Overweight with an $88 target in May, and a Morgan Stanley upgrade to Overweight with a $100 target in April. The bear corner of the Street, represented by Bernstein's Market Perform reiteration with a $46 target, looks increasingly isolated against a consensus mean of $89. RBC Capital, also constructive, raised its Outperform target to $87. The bull case centres on a supplemental NDA filing for plozasiran targeted by year-end 2026, a robust balance sheet underpinned by a $200 million Sarepta payment, and early momentum in obesity programs. Bears point to regulatory execution risk, competitive pressure, and the company's pre-profitability status — the negative P/E and deeply negative EV/EBITDA reflect a business still burning cash. The ORTEX short score is a middling 55, consistent with a stock where skeptics haven't gone away entirely.
Institutional ownership adds an interesting wrinkle. BlackRock holds nearly 13% of shares outstanding and added modestly in May. Fidelity added 747,000 shares in the same period. Geode Capital added over a million shares. Against that accumulation, Fred Alger built a new position of 1.5 million shares in Q1. On the insider side, recent activity has been uniformly on the sell side — the CMO sold 10,000 shares in late April at $75, and the CFO trimmed in the same week. These look more like programmatic selling than conviction exits, given the relatively small sums involved.
The next hard catalyst is the Q2 earnings print on August 7. The May earnings report preceded a sharp one-day fall of 8.2%, though the stock recovered to near-flat over the following five days — a pattern that suggests initial reactions to Arrowhead prints can overstate the underlying move. Between now and that date, any update on the plozasiran sNDA timeline or interim data from the obesity or CNS programs would reset the positioning equation quickly.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ARWR 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.
