ASST — Strive, Inc. — is holding an odd position: the Street remains unanimously bullish on a Bitcoin treasury play that has lost 12% over the past month, while a fresh analyst target cut lands on a day the stock rallies 5.3%.
TD Cowen's Lance Vitanza trimmed his price target to $28 from $32 today, while keeping his Buy rating intact. That move, landing just hours after Tuesday's strong close at $13.00, is the clearest signal that even supporters are marking down their conviction on the pace of Strive's Bitcoin accumulation story. The broader analyst picture reinforces that read: every firm covering ASST — TD Cowen, Benchmark, HC Wainwright, B. Riley, Maxim — carries a Buy, and the consensus target clusters around $28.80. That implies more than 100% upside from current levels, a gap wide enough to reflect genuine optimism but also the uncertainty baked into a company burning cash to build a BTC treasury. HC Wainwright sits highest at $38, B. Riley at $20 — a spread that says even bulls disagree sharply on how much the leverage strategy is worth.
The bear case is structural rather than cyclical. Strive leans heavily on preferred equity and leveraged debt rather than dilutive common stock issuance. Bears argue this limits capital available for fresh BTC acquisitions and makes the company less competitive against better-capitalised treasury peers. The bull thesis hinges on BTC continuing to appreciate fast enough to outrun the carry costs — a thesis Vitanza evidently still holds, just with a lower ceiling. Valuation multiples are deeply negative (PE around -5.4, EP ratio -0.18) reflecting a company that has not yet found a path to earnings, and the ORTEX combined score of 73.6 skews bearish on fundamentals even as it captures the elevated positioning tension.
The positioning story remains the most charged element of the setup. Availability has been at 0% every day since at least June 10 — the lending pool is completely exhausted, with nothing left to borrow. Short interest at 3.3% of free float is modest in absolute terms but has climbed 34% over the past month, meaning new shorts are somehow being established despite the dry borrow market. Cost to borrow has actually eased, now running near 1.58% versus 2.55% six weeks ago, suggesting the supply/demand dynamic in the lending market is more nuanced than the zero availability figure alone implies. Against that, the options market is sending a strikingly opposite message: the put/call ratio dropped to 0.084 on July 21, more than three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.116, and near its 52-week low. For every put, roughly twelve calls are open — an unusually aggressive directional bet.
Ownership adds one more layer of interest. FMR (Fidelity) added over 6.3 million shares in the most recent reporting period, making it the largest institutional holder at nearly 10% of shares. BlackRock added 3.1 million shares as of June 30, and Geode and State Street both built positions. Vivek Ramaswamy — Strive's co-founder — trimmed by roughly 1.4 million shares in the same window, reducing his stake to 7.8% of shares outstanding. The combination of large passive and active institutional inflows alongside founder selling is a tension worth tracking.
The next test for ASST is whether the options-driven bullishness can sustain price momentum into a market where no new borrow is available — a dynamic that constrains shorts' ability to press but also limits any squeeze catalyst from forced covering. The TD Cowen target cut, modest as it is, is worth watching for whether other firms follow.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ASST 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.
