Medical Properties Trust enters the week heading toward its August 6 earnings report with short sellers deeply entrenched and the stock continuing to lose ground — down 8% over the past month to $4.56, with no sign of a relief rally.
The short positioning here is genuinely extreme. Short interest has held around 21.9% of the free float, a level that places MPT among the most heavily shorted names in the healthcare REIT universe. The ORTEX short score sits at 82.3, a reading that has barely moved over the past two weeks — ranging from 81.8 to 82.4 — signalling persistent, high-conviction bearish positioning rather than any short-term rotation. Options traders are leaning in the same direction. The put/call ratio of 1.00 is running modestly above its 20-day average of 0.97, about 1.4 standard deviations elevated, suggesting mild defensive positioning has been building heading into the next quarter's release.
Where the lending picture becomes interesting is in the borrow cost story. Cost to borrow has collapsed from a brief spike above 3.9% in mid-June to just 0.81% now, and availability has swung from tight — below 55% in the June 10–19 window — to comfortably loose at 112%. That mid-June tightening, which coincided with the borrow rate's peak and a brief lift in short interest to over 137 million shares, has fully unwound. Shorts now face no friction entering new positions. The ease of borrowing, combined with the high short score, points to an environment where bears are comfortable holding rather than being squeezed out.
The Street offers little counterweight. The most recent analyst move came from RBC Capital's Michael Carroll on June 18, trimming his target to $4.50 from $5.00 — a level that essentially matches the current share price, leaving almost no implied upside in that estimate. The consensus mean target of $5.71 is more generous, but with the staleness caveat that RBC's downward revision likely reflects a broader drift lower. The factor scores reinforce the skepticism: the short score ranks in the bottom percentile of the universe (0th), days-to-cover sits near the bottom (2nd percentile), and the dividend score at 25 reflects the dividend cuts that have already taken place — the most recent dividend data in the snapshot dates to mid-2022, underscoring how much the income case has eroded. Price-to-book has compressed to 0.60 and has shed a further 8 points over the past 30 days, tracking the ongoing equity dilution from asset sales.
The bull case rests on stabilisation: AFFO projected at around $0.64 per share supported by an eventual rerating toward 10.5x, with operational issues at key tenants gradually resolving and non-core asset monetisation providing capital. The bear case is harder to dismiss near-term, with core FFO expected to have fallen nearly 38% in 2025 and debt refinancings — $2.5 billion completed — still weighing on quarterly run-rates, while the risk of forced asset sales to meet late-2026 and 2027 debt maturities looms as the critical variable. Peers tell a notably different story this week: AHR gained 5.6%, UHT added 1%, and HR was flat, while MPT lost a further 1.3% — the healthcare REIT sector clearly has buyers, just not for this name.
The August 6 print is the next hard date, and the question worth watching is whether management can provide any update on tenant cash recovery timelines or asset disposal progress that changes the debt maturity calculus for 2026 and 2027.
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