HIVE Digital Technologies enters its August 17 earnings report with the borrow market showing its first meaningful easing in weeks — but the stock has continued to bleed, leaving short sellers who covered early looking prescient.
The lending story has changed materially since the earnings preview published earlier this week. Availability, which collapsed to near-zero on August 11 and 12 — touching 0.18% and 0.26% respectively — bounced to 11.2% on August 13 as shares returned to the pool. That is still historically tight: the 52-week low was 0.10%, and the borrow market has repeatedly grazed those extremes through July and into August. Cost to borrow has come down from a July peak above 10% to roughly 5%, a clear easing but still a notable premium for a name of this size. What the lending data now shows is a partial, tentative reopening of supply ahead of the print — not a clean all-clear. Short interest itself reinforces that read: it has fallen 27% over the past month to about 2.8% of free float, suggesting the bulk of short covering happened into weakness rather than as a deliberate squeeze exit.
The price action frames the difficulty. HIVE has dropped 17% over the past month and closed the week at CAD 3.72, down nearly 7% on the week despite a 3% bounce on Friday. Peers have had a mixed time of it: and each gained on the day, with BTBT up 14% on the week, while and lost roughly 9% and 7% on the week respectively. HIVE sits closer to the underperforming end of that cohort, which matters heading into a print where the sector backdrop is itself uneven.
The factor scores add a note of caution. The utilization rank sits in the 4th percentile — meaning almost every comparable name has more borrow availability — and the short score of 50.4 has drifted down slightly from its recent peak of 50.8 in early August. The ORTEX short score has been remarkably stable over the past two weeks, hovering between 50.4 and 50.9, which suggests no dramatic shift in the underlying positioning signals even as the surface-level lending data has swung around. Insider activity from July showed the CFO selling roughly 100,000 shares at prices around CAD 3.19–3.20 — below where the stock trades now — alongside a round of award grants to executives including the CEO, who received 400,000 shares. The net 90-day insider position is nominally positive due to those awards, but the cash sales carry their own signal.
The earnings history adds texture: the last two reported results saw the stock fall 0.4% the following day and 8.4% respectively, with five-day losses of 13% and 22% in those same windows. Neither print produced a sustained recovery. The question around Monday's release is whether the partial borrow recovery that appeared on August 13 holds — or whether availability snaps back toward zero once the print lands and sentiment resets.
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