TeraWulf closed Tuesday at $19.87, up 5.4% on the day and 2.4% on the week — a meaningful rebound after a bruising month that has still left the stock down 31%.
The central tension this week is that the bounce happened while the short base continued to grow, not shrink. Short interest has risen to 26.4% of the free float — roughly 110.7 million shares — up from the 25.9% flagged in last week's note. The week-on-week increase of 1.8% is modest, but the direction has now been consistently upward for two weeks. More striking is what has happened to borrow availability: it collapsed from around 52% last week to just 33.7% this week, a 35% drop. That is the tightest the lending pool has been since late June and pushes WULF well into genuinely constrained territory. For context, the 52-week low on availability was 1.6% — the market is not yet near squeeze conditions, but the trajectory is moving in that direction. Cost to borrow has also picked up, climbing roughly 32% on the week to 0.89%, still low in absolute terms but now at a 30-day high. The overall borrow picture is tightening faster than the headline short interest figure alone suggests.
Options positioning has nudged slightly more defensive. The put/call ratio moved to 0.39, just above its 20-day mean of 0.37 and about 1.2 standard deviations elevated — not an extreme reading, but a mild shift worth noting given that the PCR had been running near the bottom of its annual range as recently as last week. At 0.39, the ratio remains well below the 52-week high of 0.69, so options traders are hedging at the margin, not bracing for a collapse.
The Street is firmly in the bull camp, though at a price the market has barely visited. The mean analyst target is around $38.60 — roughly double the current level — with targets ranging from Rosenblatt's $30 to Morgan Stanley's $72. Morgan Stanley raised its target to $72 from $66.50 on July 8, maintaining its Overweight, the most recent move from a bellwether firm. Cantor Fitzgerald and Rosenblatt both reiterated positive ratings with unchanged targets as recently as July 15. The bull case rests on Lake Mariner's hydro-powered infrastructure, which the company says delivers 80–90% gross margins on HPC revenue, and on the prospect of additional hyperscaler contracts as AI compute demand expands. Bears point to reliance on external financing, execution risk, and a New York regulatory environment that has already introduced a power moratorium, all of which could derail the revenue ramp. The ORTEX factor score picture is mixed: the EPS surprise rank is exceptional at the 96th percentile, and analyst recommendation differential ranks in the 94th percentile, but the short score rank sits in just the 5th percentile, reflecting how heavily the name is already shorted relative to the broader universe.
Institutional flows add another layer of interest. Bank of Nova Scotia added 12.4 million shares in the most recent reporting period to become the largest disclosed holder at 8% of shares outstanding. Jane Street built a 25.7 million share position, and Citadel added 10 million shares. These are active, tactical buyers — not passive index flows. At the same time, founder and CEO Paul Prager sold approximately $3.7 million of stock in late June, a recurring pattern: this follows a $4.3 million combined sale in May. The CEO selling into a falling stock while institutional traders are adding is a genuine divergence worth tracking.
Earnings are scheduled for August 7. The past three prints produced day-one declines of 2.5% to 10.3%, with the five-day outcomes ranging from a 9.6% loss to an 8.3% gain. The pattern suggests the initial reaction has been negative, with some recovery later — but the sample is small. Peers moved sharply higher this week — CIFR gained 15%, CLSK added 14%, and CORZ rose 8.7% — which makes WULF's 2.4% weekly gain look like relative underperformance heading into its print. What to watch next is whether the short base starts covering ahead of August 7 or continues to rebuild as the earnings date approaches — that dynamic, combined with the rate of borrow tightening, will determine whether the setup into results feels manageable or stressed.
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