Hut 8 Corp. enters its August 4 earnings report down 7% on the week and 18% over the past month, with the entire crypto mining cohort under pressure — yet shorts are still retreating and the Street just got more bullish.
The sector-wide selloff is the defining context. Every close peer closed lower on the week: CORZ fell 13.6%, WULF dropped 14%, IREN slid 17.8%, and BTDR lost 17.6%. HUT's 7.2% decline is actually the most contained of the group. That relative outperformance is notable given the short note published here six days ago — the short retreat and analyst target-raising story documented then has continued, even as the tape has turned against the sector.
Short positioning tells a story that runs against the price action. Despite the monthly pullback, short interest has continued to fall — down another 6.3% this week to 10.8% of the free float, roughly 11.7 million shares. That compares to around 16 million shares short in mid-June, a 27% reduction in one month. The borrow market is extremely loose, with availability running at 1,374% — meaning the lending pool holds roughly fourteen times as many shares available to lend as are currently borrowed. Cost to borrow has slipped to 0.51%, close to a multi-month low. Shorts are not rebuilding into this dip; they are leaving. The ORTEX short score has eased to 50.1, its lowest reading in the ten-day window, consistent with a positioning structure that is unwinding rather than building.
Options paint a mildly bullish picture heading into the print. The put/call ratio is running at 0.52, below its 20-day average of 0.55 and sitting 1.4 standard deviations on the bullish side of that average. That is close to the lower end of the past year's range, where the 52-week low is 0.31. Options traders are not hedging aggressively into earnings — they are leaning toward calls. The setup looks calmer than the price action might suggest.
Morgan Stanley's initiation last week at Overweight with a $263 target was the most striking analyst move — a bellwether firm coming in at a target nearly 60% above the current price of $101.14. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods raised to $157 on Tuesday, and Benchmark had already pushed to $195 earlier in the week. The consensus now sits at $157, implying roughly 55% upside from current levels. Not a single recent analyst action has been a downgrade or a target cut. The bull case centres on HUT's power-first infrastructure strategy and the $9.8 billion contract value from its Beacon Point campus. Bears point to heavy Bitcoin price dependence, negative return on assets, and an EV/EBITDA multiple of 86x that prices in a great deal of execution. The EPS factor score ranks in the 97th percentile for earnings surprise history — the last two prints produced one-day moves of +25.7% and +12.5%, with five-day moves of +34.5% and +17.8% respectively. That earnings reaction pattern is the single most important thing to watch heading into August 4.
The key question for next week is whether HUT's Q2 numbers — and any update on Beacon Point leasing progress — can justify a consensus target that has raced well ahead of a stock that has already given back nearly a fifth of its value since June.
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