CLSK Bears Hold Their Ground as Options Calm and Street Lifts Targets

CleanSpark reports on August 6 with short sellers still deeply entrenched, a Street that has been steadily raising targets, and options positioning that has quietly pulled back from last week's defensive extreme.

The most notable shift since the prior article is in the options market. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.50 — barely a quarter of a standard deviation above its 20-day average of 0.49. That is a meaningful retreat from the 2.6-standard-deviation spike flagged a few days ago. Protective demand has normalised. The stock itself has stabilised too, down about 5% on the week to $13.76 after a sharper decline earlier in the month. Availability in the lending market has loosened slightly, moving from roughly 21% to 27% — still tight, meaning only one share is available for every three-and-a-half already lent out, but the direction has turned less constrictive heading into the print.

Short interest tells the deeper story here. At 30.3% of free float — around 77 million shares — CLSK remains one of the most heavily shorted names in the market. That figure has declined about 1% on the week and around 5% over the past month, continuing a slow bleed from the high-water mark near 87 million shares in early July. The ORTEX short score sits at 70.8, broadly stable over the past two weeks, which ranks in the third percentile of the universe — extreme short positioning by any measure. Borrowing costs are low at 0.62% and falling, down more than 34% on the week, which tells you shorts are not under meaningful financial pressure to cover. The positioning is large and sticky, not panicked.

The analyst community has moved decisively in the other direction. Multiple firms raised targets in the past three weeks — Keefe, Bruyette & Woods lifted theirs from $16 to $25, Cantor Fitzgerald moved from $17 to $26, and Needham went from $18 to $23, all while maintaining positive ratings. The consensus mean target now stands near $23.73, implying roughly 72% above the current price. Bulls point to CleanSpark's 13,000-BTC treasury, a $560 million annualised revenue run-rate, and the company's expansion into AI and HPC infrastructure at Sandersville and potential Texas sites as a genuine pivot beyond pure-play mining. Bears counter that the stock trades at 15x EV/EBITDA for a single-segment crypto business, and that regulatory headwinds and power-cost exposure remain live risks. The last earnings print in May saw the stock fall roughly 5% on the day and a further 5% over the following week — so the pattern is not encouraging for longs heading into the report.

The August 6 print is essentially a referendum on whether CleanSpark's AI and HPC pivot has enough substance to justify a Street consensus that sits nearly double the current share price, in the face of 30% short interest that has shown no urgency to unwind.