FRMI has shed 18% in a single week — yet short sellers are adding exposure at the fastest monthly pace in its short history, even as the lending market remains wide open for new positions.
Short interest has become the defining tension on this stock. Bears added aggressively through late June and into July: SI % of free float has risen 72% in one month to nearly 5.9% of float, with the past week alone accounting for a 31.6% jump in shares short. The pace of accumulation is striking — shares short climbed from roughly 27.5 million to 36.2 million in just five trading days. What makes this unusual is that the borrow market is not constrained at all. Availability has actually loosened sharply, jumping to 538% this week from levels around 123–163% in mid-June, meaning there are more than five shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. Cost to borrow, at 0.51%, remains low despite rising 34% over the week. Shorts are not paying a squeeze premium — they are adding into a wide-open lending pool. This is conviction-driven shorting, not a technical squeeze or borrow-driven dislocation.
Options positioning reinforces the bullish skew, not the bearish one — and that divergence is worth naming. The put/call ratio is running at 0.29, near its 52-week low of 0.27 and well below its 20-day mean of 0.34. Options traders have been leaning heavily call-side all week, even as the stock fell nearly 10% in a single session on July 10. Someone is buying calls into weakness. The ORTEX short score has climbed to 54 from 43 at the start of the week, a meaningful move in five days, reflecting the surge in SI rather than any tightening in borrow conditions.
The analyst picture has turned sharply more cautious over recent months. Stifel's Stephen Gengaro lowered his target from $29 to $17 on June 23 while keeping a Buy — the latest in a sequence of cuts that has compressed the Street's mean target to $19, against a current price of $6.59. That gap may look attractive on paper, but the trajectory of revisions tells the story: UBS slashed its target from $30 to $8 earlier this year, Evercore downgraded to In-Line with an $11 target in May, and multiple analysts have trimmed numbers repeatedly without pulling positive ratings entirely. The bull case rests on Fermi's private power campus for AI-centric customers, where management argues operational timelines are intact despite a cancelled construction advance. Bears counter that execution risk is high, the revenue model is unproven, and supply chain costs could erode margins before the first major tenant comes online.
Institutional ownership adds an important layer. Founder Toby Neugebauer holds 28.9% of shares. James Perry, listed as a Founder and Director, added 7.1 million shares through June 30 and now controls 10.7%. That concentrated insider support has not, however, prevented net insider selling in the 90-day window — the CFO, COO, and other C-suite names collectively sold millions of shares in April and June, generating roughly $18.9 million in net insider proceeds. Perry's recent buying at $7.31 on June 30 stands out against that backdrop of C-suite selling.
Earnings history offers limited comfort. The most recent print on June 30 delivered a -9.8% one-day move and a -21.9% five-day move — the worst of the three recent events in the dataset. The next event is flagged for August 14.
The central question heading into August is whether the surge in short interest represents informed positioning ahead of the next earnings print, or a crowded trade into a structurally thin float — with availability still wide open and options traders still favouring calls, that answer is far from settled.
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