Rumble's Shorts Retreat as Tether Tightens Its Grip

RUM enters the week down 17% in five sessions to $7.17, yet beneath the price weakness a notable shift is underway: short sellers have been covering at pace, even as the borrow market remains tight and the ownership register tells a more complicated story.

The short covering is the week's clearest data point. Short interest has dropped 16% in seven days to 9.4% of the free float — a meaningful pullback from the 12–13% range that persisted through most of August. The move over the past month is even sharper: shorts have reduced their position by roughly a fifth, shedding around 5 million shares since mid-August. That unwind has come alongside a notable easing in borrowing costs, which have more than halved from around 9% in early August to 4.7% now. Availability has also loosened. Earlier in September it hovered near zero — at one point the borrow market was fully used — but has since opened up to around 17%, meaning roughly one share is available for every six already borrowed. The lending setup is still tight by any normal measure, but the direction is clearly toward less pressure. The ORTEX short score, while still elevated at 76, has been drifting lower all week from a peak near 79 — a reflection of the covering trend rather than any fresh build.

Options positioning paints a strikingly different picture from the shorts, and the contrast is worth naming directly. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.16 — almost a full standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.20, and brushing against the 52-week low of 0.15. That means call volume is running at nearly seven times put volume, the most call-heavy the options market has been all year. On a week when the stock fell 17%, the options market is not positioned for further downside. Whether that reflects genuine bullish conviction or simply very thin put buying on a name that already carries a structurally low PCR, the divergence from the short-side retreat is notable.

The ownership structure is one of the most unusual in small-cap media. Tether Global Investments Fund holds a 13D activist stake that, per its most recent filing on September 4, stands at 50.3% of the class — up from 48.7% previously. That's a meaningful increase, filed just 10 days ago, and it places Tether firmly in control of the company's direction. Founder Christopher Pavlovski holds a further 24% per institutional filings, though his Schedule 13D/A from February 2025 — the most recent — showed his stake had declined from 44.1% to 38.6%. With Tether and Pavlovski together controlling a dominant share of the register and the top 15 holders owning the vast majority of outstanding shares, the effective free float is narrow. That context matters when reading short interest: 9.4% of free float on a narrow float is a more concentrated position than the headline number suggests. Cooper Creek Partners added 3.8 million shares as of June 30, and BlackRock added 810,000 as of August 31 — both modest flows but in the same direction. Goldman Sachs trimmed 579,000 shares over the same period. The activist register also carries multiple 13D filers among the founding group, all last filed in early 2025; per the standard disclosure, stakes are as last disclosed around the 5% threshold, and holders dropping below 5% may not file again.

Analyst coverage has been thin and the most recent data is stale — the last recorded change was from Wedbush in March 2025, and the consensus data is marked as of November 2025. The single hold rating and $22 mean price target from that period look inconsistent with the current $7.17 price, and these figures should not be read as reflecting current Street sentiment. The earnings calendar sets the next milestone: results are due November 10. The most recent print, August 10, produced an 8% single-day gain and a 29% five-day move — the standout reaction in the recent history.

With the next earnings event more than eight weeks away, the near-term read on RUM centres on whether short covering continues at the pace seen this week, how the Tether stake evolves given its latest filing was just 10 days ago, and whether the persistently bullish options posture reflects genuine accumulation or simply a float too narrow to attract meaningful put buying.