Street Covers COAG as Shorts Build Quietly

COAG enters the week with an unusual split: Wall Street initiated coverage with near-uniform bullishness just weeks ago, yet short sellers have been quietly building positions at a pace that stands out for such a newly covered name.

The analyst picture is unambiguously constructive. Five firms initiated within weeks of each other, all with buy-equivalent ratings and targets clustering between $36 and $50 against a current price of $25.51. Goldman Sachs came in at $36. HC Wainwright, the most recent initiation filed Tuesday, set a $40 target. Evercore ISI was the most aggressive, anchoring at $50. The mean target of $41.40 implies roughly 62% upside from here — a wide gap that reflects both genuine conviction and the binary nature of clinical-stage biotech. The consensus is clean: five buys, no holds, no sells.

Yet short sellers are telling a different story. Borrowed shares rose 55% over the past week, from around 886,000 to nearly 1.38 million. That is a meaningful acceleration for a stock with a limited trading history, and the ORTEX short score has climbed in lockstep — moving from 40.5 a week ago to 53.8 now, crossing the midpoint of its range. The direction of travel is clear even if the absolute level remains moderate. With the stock down 5.5% on the week and 9% over the past month, some of that short build has already been rewarded.

The borrow market remains loose, which is the key nuance here. Availability — the ratio of shares still available to borrow relative to shares already lent out — is running at roughly 442%, comfortably in normal territory. Borrowing costs have actually eased from their May highs: cost to borrow peaked above 25% in early May and has since compressed to around 8.8%, down more than 40% on the month. That combination of rising short interest and falling borrow cost suggests new shorts are entering without friction — there is no squeeze pressure, no borrow scarcity, and no reason for hesitation on the short side at current levels. The borrow market is not a tail risk for existing shorts.

The institutional register tells a more layered story. RA Capital Management holds 17.5% of shares and has been an active buyer in the open market through May, accumulating shares across multiple sessions near the $23–$25 range. Their purchases totalled over $53 million in net value across 90 days, a sustained campaign rather than a one-off block. At the same time, the reported institutional data for most major holders shows large negative share changes — a reflection of the company's recent IPO and reorganisation rather than outright selling, given that pre-IPO share structures typically convert at listing. T. Rowe Price added a small new position in May, the only net new buyer among institutional holders beyond RA Capital.

The next scheduled earnings event lands in late August. With no revenue and a negative EV/EBITDA, the valuation is entirely a function of pipeline optionality — Hemab is developing treatments for rare bleeding disorders, a space where single clinical readouts routinely reprice names by double digits. The short build of the past week likely reflects traders taking a view on interim data timing or competitive dynamics rather than any fundamental deterioration. What to watch: whether the short score continues its climb through 60 (which would signal more aggressive positioning) and whether the analyst price target dispersion — currently spanning $36 to $50 — starts to narrow as the market forms a clearer view on the August timeline.