ANGO Shorts Retreat as Earnings Loom

AngioDynamics heads into its July 13 quarterly print with shorts quietly unwinding and the Street holding a cautious optimism that the stock's 13% monthly rebound has yet to fully validate.

The sharpest trend in positioning this week is short sellers backing away. Short interest has fallen to 4.3% of free float — down 4% on the week and nearly 12% over the past month, trimming from a peak above 5% in early May. The retreat has come alongside a sharp easing in borrowing costs, which have halved over the past week to just 0.42%. Crucially, the lending pool is nowhere near stressed: borrow availability has expanded to over 3,600% of short interest, one of the most loosely supplied borrow markets of the past year, making it trivially easy to initiate or close short positions. The ORTEX short score has drifted down steadily from 43.4 to 41.5 across June, reinforcing the picture of diminishing short conviction rather than any brewing squeeze.

Options positioning adds little drama to the setup. The put/call ratio is running at 0.35, barely above its 20-day average and well within a single standard deviation of normal. Call volume has dominated for months — a sharp contrast to early May, when the PCR spiked above 2.0 as the market absorbed the April earnings shock. That defensive extreme has fully unwound, and options traders are no longer pricing in unusual downside. Together, the lending and options data describe a market that has digested the last print and is waiting rather than bracing.

The April earnings print is the context the Street cannot ignore. The stock fell 17.6% on the day and an additional 15.5% over the five sessions that followed — one of the steepest post-earnings drops in recent memory for a mid-single-digit short-interest name. Analysts responded: Canaccord Genuity trimmed its target to $16 from $18 in early April while holding its Buy rating, and a new Buy initiation from Freedom Broker at $16 appeared the same week. The consensus remains Buy across four covering analysts, with a mean target around $18 — roughly 48% above the current $12.15. That gap is notable but should be read in light of the April reset; targets have been revised down, not up, since the miss.

The bull case rests on the Auryon atherectomy platform. Management is expanding the customer base in both hospital and outpatient settings, which is lifting average selling prices, and a push toward 52.5% gross margins through manufacturing efficiencies and a revenue mix shift toward higher-margin Med-Tech products frames the recovery story. EPS surprise ranks in the 88th percentile — meaning the company has historically beaten estimates more often than nearly nine in ten peers — an encouraging data point given the earnings trajectory. The bear case is less about the technology and more about cost pressures: $4-6 million in tariff headwinds and rising raw material costs threatening second-half margins are the primary drags on a company still reporting negative EPS and a negative PE.

Institutional ownership reveals a concentrated, activist-adjacent shareholder base. Point72 held 7.6% as of March, Broadfin Capital 5%, and Armistice Capital 4.5% — all reported last quarter with increases, suggesting smart-money interest in the recovery thesis even after the April setback. BlackRock added modestly through May, pushing its stake to 8.8%.

The July 13 print is the obvious next focal point — whether gross margin trajectory and Auryon utilisation data support the 52.5% target, or whether tariff costs and raw material pressure again undercut the recovery narrative, will determine whether the current short-seller retreat proves prescient or premature.