JSW — Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa — has now added nearly 10% in a single week and 32% over the past month, and the question is no longer whether the squeeze is happening but how much fuel remains in the tank.
Availability in the lending market has continued to open up since the August 10 trough. It now reads 34.4%, more than doubling from 15% two weeks ago and a long way from the near-zero conditions of early August. The direction is clearly toward normalisation, but context matters: 34.4% is still well below 200%, meaning the borrow pool remains tighter than normal. Cost to borrow has eased to 7.4% from a peak above 10%, down 26% on the week — a meaningful retreat, though still expensive relative to broader market rates. The ORTEX short score is 86.7, barely changed from the 87.2 reading when the squeeze began in earnest. That persistence is the key tension: the lending market is breathing, but the aggregate short position has not meaningfully unwound. Shorts returning borrowed shares has expanded availability; the shorts who remain are paying less to stay in — but they are still very much in the trade.
The valuation backdrop gives the bulls a reasonable argument to hold. JSW trades at a PE of 6.7 and an EV/EBITDA of just 2.7, with a price-to-book of 0.6 — deep value metrics that have re-rated modestly as the stock has risen, with the 30-day change in PE adding roughly 0.4 turns. The earnings-yield factor score ranks in the 93rd percentile on 30-day EPS momentum, a strong read. On the other side, the analyst consensus is a hold with a mean price target around PLN 23 — well below where the stock currently trades at PLN 33.12. That gap is worth flagging as a potential consistency check: analyst targets are 22 days old and may not reflect the post-results move, but as written they imply the Street sees the stock as stretched. The analyst recommendation divergence factor score ranks in the 96th percentile, which tends to capture exactly this kind of situation where positioning has run well ahead of formal sell-side conviction.
Ownership is anchored by the State Treasury of Poland at 55%, which has not changed its holding. Among international holders, BlackRock added a modest 20,000 shares last reported in July and Dimensional and American Century both added small positions, while Exchange Traded Concepts trimmed. None of these moves are large enough to shift the balance, but the direction among passive and factor-oriented managers is marginally constructive. The State Treasury's controlling stake also acts as a structural floor on any activist scenario.
Earnings history here is thin and compressed: the May print produced a 2.4% one-day drop followed by an 8.3% five-day recovery, while an April print generated a 3.2% gain the next day. The next scheduled earnings event is September 3 — two days away. The results that drove the August rally have already printed; what JSW reports on Thursday will cover a different period, and the market will be asking whether the operational improvement that sparked the short squeeze is durable or a one-quarter event. The borrow market, the short score, and the gap between the stock price and analyst targets will all be worth watching again once the September 3 numbers are out.
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