Hut 8 Corp. enters the back half of August with the stock down another 9% on the week to $80.79 — extending a bruising run that began with the August 4 earnings collapse — while an unusual split has opened up between rebuilding short positions and the most bullish options skew seen in a year.
Short interest has continued its post-earnings climb. It now runs at 11.5% of the free float, roughly 12.4 million shares, up 6.2% over the past week and 0.2% on Tuesday alone. That marks the highest short interest reading since late June, when it topped out near 12.7 million shares before pulling back. The week-on-week build is not explosive, but the direction is consistent — this is the fourth consecutive week of net short addition since the earnings print. The borrow market remains loose, with availability at around 905% of short interest, meaning supply for new shorts is not a constraint. Cost to borrow jumped sharply this week, rising 43% to 0.68% — still low in absolute terms but now at its highest level in over a month, suggesting incrementally more demand for the stock as a borrow.
Options positioning tells the opposite story, and that contrast is worth naming. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.42, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.52 — the most call-heavy reading of the past year. A week ago the PCR was around 0.43; a month ago it was running above 0.60. In pure options terms, demand for upside exposure has rarely been higher relative to hedging demand. That divergence — shorts rebuilding while options traders chase calls — is the tension at the centre of this setup.
The Street remains broadly constructive but has pulled targets lower after the earnings disappointment. Needham trimmed its target from $145 to $138 post-earnings while holding its Buy. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods edged down from $157 to $154, also keeping Outperform. Piper Sandler moved in the opposite direction, raising its target from $127 to $143. The mean target across analysts is $163.53 — roughly double the current price — which partly reflects Morgan Stanley's initiation at Overweight with a $263 target in late July. The bull case centres on Hut 8's power-first development model, its hyperscaler partnerships, and the Beacon Point lease as a template for future HPC commercialisation. The bear case is harder to dismiss at current prices: the company is loss-making (PE is deeply negative and EP yields are worsening), EV/EBITDA has expanded to over 100x, and Bitcoin price volatility directly threatens the revenue base. The EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 90th percentile — the company does tend to beat estimates — but the fundamental quality metrics remain weak.
The institutional holder list offers some context for why the stock has held up better than the absolute peer carnage might suggest. BlackRock added roughly 845,000 shares through July, and Vanguard added nearly 1.4 million, making them respectively the largest and fourth-largest reported holders. Lone Pine initiated a new position of just over 6 million shares in Q1. These are meaningful flows into a stock with a free float of around 108 million shares. Insider activity is less encouraging: the most recent insider transaction on record is a $1.25 million sale by the Chief Legal Officer in mid-June at $125, well above current levels. Net insider activity over 90 days is modestly positive in share terms but that reflects stock awards rather than open-market purchases.
Peers have continued to sell off in tandem. CIFR dropped 13% on Tuesday. KEEL fell 16%. WULF lost 11%. RIOT slid 5.6%. CLSK and BTDR — the relative outperformers of the week — managed modest gains. The sector is not finding a floor, and HUT's modest outperformance on the week noted in the prior note has now evaporated: the stock has given back more than peers on a one-day basis. The earnings history adds a cautionary note — the two most recent prints each produced double-digit one-day falls and the losses deepened over five sessions, averaging around 15% by day five. The next earnings event is scheduled for November 4.
What to watch is whether the call-heavy options positioning proves prescient or gets unwound — particularly if Bitcoin prices weaken further and pull the entire mining cohort lower into September, at which point the gap between the 0.42 PCR and an 11.5% short interest starts to look like a one-sided conversation.
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