IperionX enters the back half of June under real pressure — the stock has dropped 19% over the past month to A$4.19, the earnings print delivered a savage response, and the ORTEX short score has quietly climbed to its highest reading in the observable history.
The most striking development this week is not the price decline itself but the divergence between what short sellers are doing and what the short score is signalling. Short interest has been essentially range-bound, nudging up just 1.5% on the week to 8.9% of the free float — a meaningful but not extreme level for a small-cap diversified metals name. The bear case is not being aggressively rebuilt. Yet the ORTEX short score has risen steadily from 72.5 on June 12 to 74.9 now, a new high for the period. That score incorporates a broader set of signals beyond raw short positioning, and its continued climb even as absolute short interest stalls suggests the underlying conditions — price weakness, thin liquidity, elevated days-to-cover at 18.8 — are doing the work without shorts needing to add new positions. The borrow market remains well-supplied: availability at 226% means there are more than two shares available to borrow for every one currently borrowed, so there is no squeeze pressure and plenty of capacity for bears to add if they choose to.
Cost to borrow has drifted slightly lower on the week at 3.2%, though it remains 41% above where it was a month ago — a reminder that the lending market repriced sharply during the post-earnings selloff. That spike in CTB has not reversed fully, which tells a subtly more cautious story about lender confidence than the headline availability number alone would suggest. The ORTEX factor scores reinforce the caution: the short score rank sits at the 1st percentile of the universe — meaning virtually every other stock scores lower on bearish signals — while the days-to-cover rank is in the 4th percentile, reflecting how illiquid IPX is relative to its short position.
The earnings history here is brutally one-sided. The June 16 print delivered a -16% single-day move and a -23% five-day move. Before that, the March event produced a -26% single-day drop and a -50% five-day collapse. The one exception was a brief April announcement that generated an 8% single-day bounce and a 14% five-day rally — an outlier in an otherwise consistent pattern of heavy post-announcement selling. The next scheduled event is September 24.
The ownership picture offers the most constructive counterpoint. Executive Chairman Todd Hannigan and CEO Anastasios Arima both bought stock on the open market in late April — Hannigan across two days for a combined A$1.5 million equivalent, Arima adding 110,000 shares at similar levels. Hannigan had also bought in late March near A$3.20. Those purchases were made at prices below current levels, putting both insiders offside for now. Van Eck Associates added over 15 million shares in the period to May 31, bringing their stake to 13.5% of shares. BNY Asset Management remains the largest declared holder at 21.2%. That institutional base provides a degree of structural support, but none of the recent additions have been large enough relative to the total float to act as a meaningful price floor.
What to watch is whether the short score continues to push higher into the September earnings window, and whether insider buying resumes near current levels — the last cluster of purchases came when the stock was trading at similar or lower prices, making the A$4.00 zone a level Hannigan and Arima have previously treated as an entry point.
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