COAG enters its August 20 earnings date having more than doubled the pace of its short position in a month — yet the stock keeps climbing anyway.
The most striking dynamic on Hemab Therapeutics this week is a simultaneous lift in both the bull and bear camps. The stock is up 11% over the past five days and 36% over the past month, closing Tuesday at $51.74. At the same moment, short interest has climbed 40% over the same 30-day window to roughly 2.14 million shares — a pace of rebuilding that is hard to ignore heading into a binary catalyst. The ORTEX short score, which aggregates directional signals in the lending market and positioning data, has moved from 60 in late July to 70.1 as of August 11, its highest reading over the sampled period. That puts the score firmly in the elevated-bearish zone, even as the price chart tells the opposite story.
The lending market offers some nuance that prevents the short picture from looking extreme. Borrow costs have actually eased — from around 8% in early July to roughly 5.1% now — suggesting that despite the growing short position, bears are not fighting over scarce supply. Availability is at 139%, meaning for every share currently borrowed short, nearly 1.4 shares remain lendable. That is a tighter reading than the loose 960%-plus availability seen in early July, and the tightening has been rapid — availability nearly halved in the past week alone — but it is still far from a stressed borrow market. The short rebuild looks like conviction-driven positioning ahead of the print, not a crowded squeeze setup.
The analyst community has moved decisively in the opposite direction to those shorts. Two firms raised price targets this week alone: Wedbush lifted its target to $64 from $55 on August 12, and HC Wainwright moved to $60 from $52 on August 11, both maintaining positive ratings. Those follow a round of initiations and target hikes in late May and mid-July across Wedbush, HC Wainwright, Jefferies, and Evercore ISI Group — all four carrying buy-equivalent ratings with a consensus mean target of $61.20. The bull case centres on sutacimig (HMB-001), a bispecific antibody in trials for Glanzmann thrombasthenia and Factor VII deficiency, with bears flagging FDA approval risk, competitive pressure, and the ongoing need for additional financing. The stock at $51.74 trades at a modest discount to the consensus, implying roughly 18% upside to the $61.20 mean on current analyst estimates — though for a pre-revenue biotech, the price-to-pipeline relationship is what actually matters.
Institutional flows add an interesting layer. FMR (Fidelity) reported a fresh 3.7 million-share position as of June 30 — a new stake, not an addition to an existing one. Vanguard Capital Management added 893,000 shares in the same quarter. On the other side, insider accumulation from RA Capital Management, a 10% owner and board participant, ran steadily from early May through mid-June at prices in the $24.50–$25.00 range. Those purchases look prescient now with the stock above $51, but they also flag that sophisticated, company-linked capital was buying aggressively at roughly half the current price — a detail worth holding alongside the bear case on valuation and approval risk.
With the next earnings event on August 20 and what appears to be a pre-announcement disclosure already filed on August 11, the question heading into next week is whether that August 11 release — which did not carry the usual price-reaction data — contained enough substance to validate the month-long rally, or whether it simply set the stage for the formal print. The pace at which availability continues to tighten and whether short interest breaks to new highs in the days before August 20 will be the clearest real-time signal of how the institutional positioning is resolving.
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