Viridian Therapeutics heads into the summer with a striking contradiction at its core: options traders are the most bullish they have been in months, yet short sellers are quietly adding to one of the heaviest positions in the biotech complex.
The options signal is the sharpest data point this week. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.077 — nearly at the 52-week low of 0.075 and almost 1.7 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.183. That is an unusually lopsided skew toward calls, suggesting the options market is pricing in further upside rather than hedging for a pullback. The shift is dramatic: as recently as mid-May, the ratio was running above 1.4. Something changed in late May and early June, and it pulled options positioning from defensive to aggressively bullish in a matter of weeks.
Short interest tells a different story. At 16% of the free float — roughly 15.3 million shares — the short book is large and has been building. It grew about 18.5% over the past month, even as the stock climbed 5.3% in that window and added another 7.6% this week to close near $17.90. That combination — rising stock and rising short interest — means shorts have been absorbing pain rather than capitulating. The borrow market, however, gives them little reason to panic: availability is loose at 557%, well above the 52-week minimum of 179%, and the cost to borrow is a negligible 0.57%. There is no mechanical squeeze pressure here. Shorts can hold their position cheaply, and ample shares remain available for new entrants. The ORTEX short score of 58.9, sitting in roughly the 25th percentile for short score rank, reflects that the setup is elevated but not at an extreme.
The Street broadly agrees the stock is worth more than $17.90, but conviction has been trimmed. Analyst targets cluster around $27–$34, implying meaningful upside from current levels. The most recent notable move came from Goldman Sachs in early April, cutting its target from $36 to $31 while keeping a Buy. The direction of travel across the group since April has been uniformly downward on targets — Evercore, Wedbush, RBC, and Truist all lowered numbers, though all maintained positive ratings. That pattern reflects a Street that still believes in the veligrotug story against Tepezza in thyroid eye disease, but has marked down its near-term assumptions. The bull case rests on orphan-drug pricing power and accelerated approval optionality. The bear case centres on the cash burn — a net loss running at roughly $105 million annually — and the challenge of winning market share from an entrenched standard of care, with an equity raise on the horizon adding dilution risk.
The institutional register adds an important dimension. Fairmount Funds Management, which holds a 10%-plus stake and sits on the board, bought 1.18 million shares in May at $17.00 — a $20 million commitment made essentially at current prices. That is not a passive index rebalancing; it is a concentrated, board-level bet made with full knowledge of the competitive and financial picture. BlackRock added 1.4 million shares through May, and Deep Track Capital built a position of over 4 million shares. The ownership base reads as specialist healthcare money that has done the work and is leaning in, even as targets have been trimmed. Against that, the short book — at 16% of float — represents a meaningful cohort that disagrees.
After the next scheduled earnings print on August 7, the key watch will be whether the options market's bullish skew is vindicated or collapses back toward its prior equilibrium — and whether the short position starts to cover or deepen further as clinical and commercial clarity on veligrotug comes into focus.
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