WF heads into its July 24 results with short sellers decisively retreating — a meaningful shift for a stock under pressure on the price side.
The standout is the rapid unwinding of short positions. Short interest has fallen roughly 16% over the past week and is now down nearly 8% in a single session. That is a brisk reversal for a name where shorts had built up nearly 46% more exposure over the prior month. What's equally notable is the lending environment: borrow availability is exceptionally loose at over 1,170% — meaning shares available to borrow dwarf the current short position by more than eleven to one. That isn't the profile of a squeezed lending market. It is a market where shorts are choosing to exit, not being forced out. The cost to borrow has risen sharply — up nearly 59% on the week to 1.72% — but remains low in absolute terms. The ORTEX short score has dropped from 37 to 32 over the past ten days, consistent with the short-covering trend. The stock itself has softened, down roughly 5% over the past month and closing at $62.45, so the short exits are not obviously driven by a rally.
The bull case for Woori centres on a genuine re-rating of earnings expectations. The 12-month forward EPS growth estimate has swung from deeply negative to strongly positive over the first half of 2026. Value metrics remain attractive, with price-to-book well below 1, and the dividend score ranks in the 84th percentile — a meaningful draw for yield-oriented institutional buyers. BlackRock built its stake by over 7 million shares in the most recent reported quarter, now holding above 8% of shares, a vote of some confidence from the largest passive allocator on the planet. Bears point to the EPS surprise track record, which ranks in just the 10th percentile — meaning the company has routinely missed estimates — and to fading short-term earnings momentum, with the 90-day EPS momentum score sitting in the 19th percentile. The stock's recent price weakness into results amplifies the asymmetry: there is room for disappointment to be punished.
Earnings history adds a cautious footnote. The April 2026 print was followed by a 4.4% single-day decline. The February event produced a more modest 1% drop. Neither was a catastrophic move, but both went the wrong way initially. The analyst data on file is too dated to be actionable — the most recent noted change runs back to early 2023 — so the Street's current posture is unclear from this dataset alone.
The July 24 print is therefore squarely a test of whether the dramatic upward revision to earnings forecasts translates into actual delivered numbers — and whether a bank trading at a discount to book can prove that discount is unwarranted.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open WF on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
