Alumis Inc. heads into its June 30 quarterly earnings with short sellers rebuilding positions at pace — even as the stock climbs toward a six-week high.
The sharpest signal this week is the sudden acceleration in short interest. Bears added shares aggressively on June 25, pushing short interest up 16% in a single session to 13.6% of free float — a 28% jump over the past month. That brings shorted shares to roughly 13.2 million, the highest level in the 30-day window, with FINRA's fortnightly settlement data showing 12.7 million shares short as of June 15 and a days-to-cover ratio of 8.7. The ORTEX short score reflects this shift, jumping to 72.1 on June 25 from 64.5 a week earlier — a move that stands out even for a stock that has carried elevated short interest for months. Despite that short-side pressure, the lending market remains wide open. Availability has tightened sharply — down 45% on the week to 279% — but that still leaves roughly three shares available to borrow for every two already lent out, so the conditions for a mechanical squeeze are not yet in place. Borrowing costs are cheap at 0.56%, having eased about 7% on the week, reinforcing that this is positioned betting rather than a desperate scramble for borrows.
Options tell the opposite story. Calls are dominating flow by a wide margin — the put/call ratio is running at 0.23, almost 1.6 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.29, and has dropped notably since mid-June when it was closer to 0.32. That PCR level is near the low end of the past year's range. Options traders are not hedging into this print; they are leaning bullish. The contrast with the short-side build is the week's defining tension: bears are adding exposure through stock loans while options participants pile into calls ahead of Monday's release.
The Street's overall message is constructive, though not uniformly so. Most of the recent analyst actions — from Wells Fargo (Overweight, $51 target) and Oppenheimer (Outperform, $55 target) — are upward revisions following May's data updates, and Morgan Stanley carries an Overweight with a $38 target. The mean price target of $40.10 implies around 52% upside from Friday's close of $26.40 at face value, though HC Wainwright stepped to Neutral in May and held a $25 target, signalling scepticism right at current levels. Note that analyst data here is approximately 40 days old and predates the current price level, so individual targets should be treated with some caution. The bull case rests on envudeucitinib's phase III data in psoriasis and SLE — competitive efficacy, oral dosing, and no fasting requirement — while bears point to an approval pathway still unproven, a crowded TYK2 inhibitor field including Takeda and J&J, and the perennial clinical-stage risk of needing to raise capital before reaching cash-flow breakeven.
Institutional ownership adds an interesting layer of context. Matrix Capital and Foresite Capital each hold roughly 12% of shares, making them the dominant anchors. BlackRock added over 2.6 million shares as recently as May 31, and T. Rowe Price initiated or substantially rebuilt a 2.6% position in the same window — both passive and active flows moving in the same direction. The most recent insider transactions on record — VC board members buying at $17 in January — are now too stale to carry much signal at current prices of $26.40, but they do mark a cost basis well below today's level for those insiders.
Prior earnings prints have been consistently negative in the short run. The last three reported releases each produced a negative one-day move, ranging from flat to down 8%, with five-day follow-throughs also tilting lower in two of those three cases. Monday's release is therefore the clearest near-term catalyst to watch — specifically whether the company provides any update on regulatory timelines for envudeucitinib and how the SLE trial data is progressing relative to the competitive landscape.
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