TeraWulf drops to $19.41 this week, down 25% over the past month, yet the short base that's been betting against it continues to sit on its hands.
The restraint from short sellers remains the defining tension. At 25.9% of the free float — around 108.5 million shares — short interest is one of the largest bear positions in crypto mining. But the week-on-week change is just +2.6%, and it has barely moved directionally in a month. That small week-on-week uptick is notable precisely because it didn't come with conviction: shorts added only marginally even as the stock fell another 7% on Tuesday alone. The pattern from the previous week's note holds — this looks like position management, not escalation. Borrow conditions reinforce that read. Cost to borrow has eased slightly to 0.67% on the week, cheap for a stock this heavily shorted. Availability has tightened sharply, though — down 56% over the week to 52%, the tightest level since late June. That alone is worth watching: if availability continues compressing toward the 52-week low of 1.6%, the borrow market would shift from neutral to stressed quickly.
Options positioning has turned more defensive than at any point in recent weeks. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.40 — more than two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.37 — the highest defensive tilt in this reading window. That's a meaningful shift for a stock that's been running a persistently call-heavy book. The ORTEX short score has edged higher too, now at 70.5 and rising steadily from 67.7 a week ago, reflecting the combined pressure of tightening availability, modestly rising SI, and a softening price trend.
The Street is constructively positioned but clearly ahead of where the stock is trading. Multiple firms raised targets in the past two weeks — Morgan Stanley lifted its Overweight target to $72 on July 8, while Needham moved to $33 and Rosenblatt to $30, both reaffirming Buy. Today, Cantor Fitzgerald and Rosenblatt both reiterated their positive ratings without change. The consensus mean target of $38.58 implies roughly double the current price — a gap that reflects genuine disagreement about execution rather than valuation methodology. The bull case centers on the Anthropic deal for 401MW of critical IT capacity at Hawesville and the long-term AI infrastructure thesis. The bear case is blunter: Q1 adjusted EBITDA missed, HPC ramp has been slower than promised, and the $8.3 billion enterprise value on EV/EBITDA of 37x prices in execution that hasn't materialized yet. The analyst recommendation score ranks in the 98th percentile — effectively unanimous bullishness from the covering universe — but the EPS surprise factor (96th percentile) sits awkwardly alongside a near-zero EPS momentum score of just 2, a sign that beats have been fading even as targets climb.
CEO and founder Paul Prager sold $3.7 million of stock on June 29 at $26.60, following a similar $2.8 million sale on May 27. Both were well above the current price. Those sales alone aren't unusual for a founder managing liquidity, but they come as the stock has now fallen roughly 27% from the June 29 sale price in two and a half weeks. The top institutional register shows Jane Street added 25.7 million shares as of late April — a large, recent build from a market maker that could reflect options-related hedging as much as directional conviction. BlackRock added 2.1 million shares through June 30, a steadier institutional signal.
Earnings arrive August 7. The three most recent prints all produced negative one-day moves, averaging roughly 5% to the downside on the day. The five-day outcomes are mixed — the June print recovered 8% over the following week after an initial 10% drop. With the stock already down 25% in a month and the Street holding targets between $30 and $72, the August 7 result is less a binary event and more a referendum on whether the HPC ramp narrative has any near-term numbers to back it up. Availability tightening into that date is the technical factor worth tracking most closely.
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