KS Bancorp ends April with its sharpest weekly gain in months, driven by a 25% year-over-year rise in net income reported on April 24.
The earnings result is the clearest driver of this week's move. The stock closed at $85.00 on April 29, up nearly 5% on both a one-day and one-week basis — the two figures are identical, indicating the entire weekly gain arrived in a single session. That one-day reaction of +4.9% follows a similar pattern from January 2026, when an earnings announcement also pushed the stock up roughly 4% the next day before extending gains to about 2.6% over the following week. The next event is already on the calendar: another earnings release is scheduled for May 6.
Short interest is minimal and fading fast. Shorts amount to roughly 0.005% of the free float — a negligible figure for any stock. More striking is the pace of unwinding: shares short have dropped more than 76% over the past month, from around 249 shares in late March to just 58 now. With availability at 2,561% of short interest, the lending market is as loose as it gets — there is no borrow pressure, no squeeze risk, and no meaningful bearish conviction embedded in the positioning data.
The borrow market itself is quiet. Cost to borrow is running near 0.96% annualised, well below the multi-year high of 5.5% seen in 2019. The most recent CTB data is dated mid-March, so it should be treated as directionally informative rather than precisely current. Availability at 2,561% confirms that shorts face no friction whatsoever. The ORTEX short score is 26.8 — a low reading — though it has ticked up modestly from around 25.3 over the past week, tracking the small repositioning in the score history.
The broader picture is of a lightly traded, micro-cap community bank trading on fundamentals rather than positioning. Market cap is approximately $90 million. No analyst coverage, no options market, and no active institutional signals are visible in the data. The factor scores offer limited differentiation: the sector score is at the 50th percentile, the dividend score ranks in the 17th percentile, and short score rank is in the 82nd percentile of its universe — meaning shorts have been lower here relative to peers, which aligns with the near-zero SI. The dividend history is stale (last recorded payment was July 2022), so no current yield read is available.
With May 6 earnings approaching, the question on this name is straightforward: whether the Q1 momentum — 25% net income growth — carries into Q2 guidance.
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