UAMY delivered its earnings print Wednesday evening, and the short base responded immediately — short interest jumped nearly 11% in a single session to 23.6% of the free float, reversing the covering trend that had been in place for most of the past month.
The most striking development is how sharply positioning has shifted in just 24 hours. Short interest climbed from roughly 29.8 million shares to 33.0 million overnight — a one-day addition of more than 3.2 million shares — erasing much of the covering activity that had brought the figure down from above 24% through late July. That rebuilding happened against a borrow market that remains completely locked: availability has been effectively zero for weeks, with the lending pool fully drawn for all but a handful of sessions since late June. Yet new shorts are clearly still finding ways in. Cost to borrow has ticked up 25% on the week to 1.70%, still modest in absolute terms, but the direction confirms fresh demand for borrows. Options traders, meanwhile, remain firmly call-side — the put/call ratio is running at 0.22, below its 20-day average of 0.23 and far below the 52-week high of 0.73. That means even as shorts rebuilt, options positioning retained the bullish lean it has held all month. The two signals are pulling in opposite directions.
The Street's single active voice on UAMY moved this morning. HC Wainwright cut its price target from $11.75 to $9.25 while holding its Buy rating — the firm's analyst has now raised and lowered the target twice in 2026, tracking the stock's volatile relationship with antimony prices. At $9.25, the revised target still implies roughly 40% upside from the current $6.58 close, and the mean target across coverage remains at $11.19. The bull case centres on antimony's price surge from $5.96 to $28.72 per pound and the company's domestic supply projects in Alaska and Montana, with management targeting $125 million in 2026 revenue. The bear case is harder to dismiss: a $3.9 million net loss driven by share-based compensation, geopolitical supply disruptions, and heavy reliance on a single geography. The ORTEX short score has crept to 73.2, its highest reading in the available history, and factor scores are deeply cautionary — short score ranks in the bottom 1st percentile of all stocks, with days-to-cover in the 8th.
Institutional flows add a layer of complexity. Van Eck Associates and Vanguard Capital Management each appear as new entrants in the July 31 filing window, adding 10.4 million and 6.0 million shares respectively — substantial builds that suggest passive and thematic critical-minerals exposure arriving just as shorts were doing the same. BlackRock and State Street also added to positions, with State Street picking up 3.3 million shares. The insider picture is less encouraging: the CFO sold $975,000 worth of stock in early June at $9.75, and an executive director sold twice in March and April at prices well above the current level. The most recent insider buy was a director's modest $93,000 purchase in mid-June. Net insider activity over 90 days shows net buying in share count terms, but the value-weighted story is dominated by those June and April sales at significantly higher prices.
Critical-minerals peers had a strong week broadly. MP gained 16.4% and TMC rose 15.2%, while USAR added 9.5% — all outpacing UAMY's 7.5% weekly gain. CRML was the outlier, essentially flat on the week. The sector tailwind was real, but UAMY's post-earnings short rebuild suggests the print itself gave bears something to work with even as the sector moved higher around it.
The next session will test whether the short rebuild is a conviction move or a knee-jerk reaction to earnings details — with availability still at zero and institutional buyers freshly on the register, the mechanics of any further short accumulation remain constrained by a lending market with nothing left to give.
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