Huntsman Corporation enters the final session of September with its shares down 7.4% on the week to $8.38, a stock in persistent retreat, and the most compelling development is not the short book but who is buying.
Peter Huntsman, the company's Chairman, President and Chief Executive, made an open-market purchase of 100,000 shares on August 3 at $9.81, a $981,000 commitment made without a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. That is a discretionary bet from the person who knows the business best, at a price that now sits well above where the stock trades today. His filing also carries a Schedule 13D, meaning the SEC has him on record as a potentially activist holder with 5.09% of the class. The 13D designation is worth noting: it is the same instrument used by outside activists to signal intent to engage, though in this case it is the founder family exercising the same formal channel. Separately, BlackRock has been a significant buyer, lifting its stake from 4.3% to 7.4% per its latest 13G amendment filed in late July, while American Century added over 3.3 million shares in the period to August.
Positioning in the lending market is effectively a non-story at these levels. Availability in the borrow pool is at the practical ceiling, around 9,999% of short interest, meaning there are roughly 154 million shares available to lend against a short position of around 12.3 million. Borrowing costs have more than halved over the past week to 0.28%, the lowest in the 30-day window. Short interest itself has been falling, down about 21% over the past month to 7.1% of the free float, with the official FINRA fortnightly figure putting short shares at roughly 13 million. This is a stock where short sellers have been covering, not piling in, even as the price has fallen. Options traders tell a similar story: the put/call ratio at 0.45 is well below its 20-day average of 0.51 and nearly at its 52-week low of 0.41, about one and a half standard deviations light on protective positioning relative to recent norms. That is an unusual combination with a stock down more than 11% in a month.
The Street is cautious but not uniformly negative. Citigroup's analyst cut the price target to $9 from $11 today, while keeping a Neutral rating, the second time Citi has touched the name in two weeks after reinstating coverage on September 15 with an $11 target. Keybanc initiated at Overweight with a $14 target on September 11, providing the only fresh bull voice of recent weeks. The consensus mean target sits around $11.38, roughly 36% above the current price, though that figure is being dragged down by a sequence of cuts from Wells Fargo, UBS, RBC, and Mizuho since early August. Bank of America maintains an Underperform rating, the only explicit sell on the visible register. Two factor scores are worth flagging in opposite directions: EPS momentum ranks in the 99th and 100th percentiles over 30 and 90 days respectively, meaning forward estimate revisions have been running sharply higher even as the stock has fallen, while the short score rank of 22 places it comfortably in the less-shorted cohort of the universe. EV/EBITDA has compressed slightly over 30 days to around 8.4x, and the price-to-book ratio of 0.54 reflects a stock trading at a steep discount to book value.
The core tension is laid out clearly by the bull and bear cases. Bears point to persistent weakness in price and volume across all segments, driven by global oversupply in polyurethanes and MDI, tariff headwinds, and Asian product pressure into South America. EBITDA estimates have been revised down for Q3 and both full years. Bulls counter that roughly 75% of the MDI book is differentiated and price-inelastic, that new capacity and cost actions should deliver year-on-year earnings improvement in 2026, and that recovery in construction and automotive end-markets remains the key rerating catalyst. The peer group is not offering much comfort: closest correlated peer OLN fell 8.3% on the week, and TROX dropped 9.3%, suggesting the selling pressure is broadly sector-driven rather than Huntsman-specific.
Wikipedia attention has picked up, with a z-score of 1.75 against the company's own trailing 90 days as of September 22, an attention signal rather than a financial one, but it tracks with a period of elevated news flow around the Citi reinstatement, the Keybanc initiation, and the ongoing earnings estimate revisions. Next earnings are scheduled for November 4. The question heading into that print is whether the estimate cuts of recent months have created a low enough bar, or whether the supply and demand imbalances in MDI are proving more persistent than the bulls assumed.
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