EROC enters the final week of September with a striking contradiction at its core: short sellers have roughly doubled their positions in a month, yet an activist investor holding a 78% Schedule 13D stake sits at the top of the register.
Short interest is the week's most urgent signal. Bears have piled in aggressively — shares short have more than doubled over the past month, up 121%, and jumped another 36% in the past week alone to reach 12.75 million shares. The pace is notable because availability has been whipsawing: as recently as Monday September 21, the borrow market tightened to 12.7% availability — the tightest reading in at least a year, meaning only one share was available to borrow for every eight already lent out. By Thursday it had loosened back to 70%, suggesting shorts found fresh inventory mid-week and used it. Cost to borrow reflects that volatility, spiking to 4.78% intraday on Monday before retreating to 2.84% by end of week — up 60% on the week and 24% on the month. The ORTEX short score has climbed steadily to 74.3, near its highest level in the tracked history, consistent with the broader pressure being applied by short sellers. Options, in contrast, are leaning bullish — the put/call ratio at 0.52 is running well below its 20-day average of 0.59, almost 1.4 standard deviations to the call-heavy side, suggesting that options traders are not sharing the bears' urgency.
The structural backdrop makes that divergence genuinely interesting. Energy Impact Partners LLC filed a Schedule 13D in June, disclosing a 78.1% stake in EROC — an activist filing, and one of the most significant ownership facts about this stock. The caveat, as with all 13D/G disclosures, is that stakes are as last reported; a holder can reduce below 5% without filing again. Still, an activist at 78% leaves precious little float for the short sellers piling in, which partly explains why the borrow market touched its annual floor just this week. The top five registered holders collectively account for well over 80% of the share count, leaving an unusually thin free float for a NYSE-listed name.
The Street, which only began covering EROC in early July with a wave of initiations, has broadly positive but modestly tempered targets. The consensus is tilted firmly toward Buy and Overweight, with price targets clustering in the $20–$24 range against a current price of $12.60 — implying more than 60% upside on the mean. The most recent action came from Guggenheim on September 2, which trimmed its target to $20 from $23 while keeping a Buy rating, and from Morgan Stanley in August, which lifted its target to $23. BofA upgraded to Buy in mid-July. These figures appear internally consistent — a stock trading at $12.60 with targets in the low-to-mid $20s is a plausible setup for a recently listed name, not a data artefact. The trailing PE of 45.6x and price-to-book near 9.9x have both compressed meaningfully over the past month (PE down roughly 30%), suggesting the market has been discounting the stock even as the analyst community holds its ground.
The earnings calendar adds a near-term focal point. EROC's next scheduled report is November 12, and history shows the stock moves sharply after results — the most recent print in August generated a 31–39% single-day gain depending on which event timestamp is used, with a five-day follow-through exceeding 27%. Prior to that, the stock fell almost 10% in the five days after the preceding release. Volatility around earnings, combined with the current short-squeeze arithmetic in the borrow market, means the November report will be worth watching closely for both bulls chasing the analyst targets and bears navigating a structurally thin float.
Whether the lending market stays loose enough to sustain the short position build — or tightens again as it did on September 21 — is the clearest near-term tell for how this tension resolves.
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