Almonty Industries heads into mid-July with a clear insider-selling story sitting uncomfortably alongside renewed short-side interest — the stock is up on the week, but the people who know it best have been selling hard.
The insider activity is the standout this week. Lead Independent Director Mark Trachuk has sold shares on three separate occasions since late June, offloading a combined 400,000 shares across trades on July 2, July 6, and July 8 at prices ranging from CAD $21 to $24. Total proceeds across those three transactions came to roughly USD $6.5 million. Founder, Chairman, and CEO Michael Black added to the picture in mid-June, selling just under 100,000 shares at around CAD $25. Strip out non-cash director award grants, and the 90-day net insider position is a seller by a material margin — the headline net figure of roughly 692,000 shares nominally positive only because of those zero-cost awards. The pattern of consistent, cash-sale selling from two separate senior figures across multiple weeks is worth tracking alongside the stock's -10% one-month decline, even as the shares recovered 4.5% on Tuesday to close at CAD $22.19.
The short-side picture tells a more nuanced story. Short interest has roughly doubled over the past month to around 1.9% of the free float — elevated by recent standards but not extreme in absolute terms. What's interesting is the shape of the move: shorts built hard through late June, peaking above 5.5 million shares around July 6, then unwound nearly 20% in one week. That partial retreat is the "direction: falling" signal in the data, but the one-month doubling means the base is meaningfully higher than it was. Cost to borrow remains cheap at under 1%, and availability is comfortable at around 230% of short interest — well above the 52-week trough of 117% — so there is no borrow squeeze pressure here. The short score has drifted slightly higher over the past two weeks to 41, ranking in the 28th percentile versus peers, consistent with a modest but not alarming short-side lean.
Institutional ownership adds another layer of complexity. FMR (Fidelity) added over 10 million shares as of April, becoming a 6.3% holder. Van Eck and BlackRock also added materially into Q1. Goldman Sachs holds just under 1.7% of shares. On the other side, Deutsche Rohstoff AG cut its position by nearly 10 million shares as of March — a significant reduction. M. Black (likely the CEO's holding vehicle) shows a 13.8 million share reduction in the most recent filing, which aligns with the insider sell pattern above. The institutional register is actively in motion, with large buyers and large sellers appearing simultaneously.
The fundamental tension underpinning all of this is the tungsten thesis itself. Almonty's Sangdong mine in South Korea positions the company as a rare non-Chinese tungsten producer at a moment when supply chain security has become a genuine policy priority. Sales growth ran at 73% year-on-year, a genuine operational bright spot. But quality metrics remain weak — the Piotroski F-Score holds at 3, ROA is negative, and free cash flow to assets is deeply negative. The EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed roughly 3.5 turns over the past month, and the P/B ratio has pulled back similarly, suggesting the market is becoming more selective on valuation even as the strategic narrative remains intact. Analyst data in the system is stale by nearly a year and cannot be reliably used to assess current Street consensus.
Peer performance this week was broadly positive for the group, with closest correlate TLO surging 15.6% on the week and ARG up 19.3%, while MKO slipped nearly 6%. Almonty's 2.9% weekly gain looks modest by comparison, though the one-day move of 4.5% suggests some catch-up. The next earnings event is pencilled for August 10 — and given that the last four prints produced moves ranging from -7.6% to +12.6% on the day, with a tendency toward weakness in the five-day window, that date will be the next focal point for both the insider-selling narrative and the short-side reset.
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