Iovance Biotherapeutics enters October with short sellers still holding a large position despite a week that inflicted serious losses, and the Street rapidly repricing what the company's commercial trajectory is worth.
The week's central tension is a positioning paradox. Short interest barely moved through the guidance catalyst. IOVA closed Tuesday at $14.45, up 31% on the day and 36% on the week, after Iovance raised its full-year 2026 revenue outlook to $410 million to $420 million. Short interest came into that session at 20.1% of the free float, roughly 79.8 million shares, and by end-of-week it had barely budged, falling only 0.2% on the week. Bears who had been pressing positions in early September, when short interest hit 101 million shares or about 25.7% of the float around September 9, did cover some ground between September 10 and 14. But those who stayed are now deeply underwater. The stock is trading 66% above where that September short-building episode was concentrated.
The lending market has loosened substantially, which cuts both ways. Availability has expanded to 249%, more than double the shares already borrowed available to lend. That is well above the 52-week trough of 10.4%, reached when the borrow market was its tightest. Cost to borrow has fallen 28% on the week to just 0.32%, its lowest level in this series. Put differently, it is inexpensive and feasible for new shorts to enter here. The lack of any mechanical squeeze pressure, despite the massive price move, may explain why the short book has proved so sticky. There is no borrowing emergency forcing covers; the bears who remain are choosing to stay. Options positioning reinforces that: the put/call ratio at 0.44 is fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.46 and roughly 1.7 standard deviations below that mean, consistent with call demand outpacing put buying through the rally, not the defensive hedging that typically accompanies a stock where the short side feels trapped.
The Street pivoted sharply this week, and the direction of travel is uniformly higher even if individual targets still sit below the current price. Goldman Sachs reinstated coverage on September 24 with a Buy and a $15 target, a meaningful signal given it follows the stock through a multi-year gap. Wells Fargo lifted its target to $18 from $14 on September 30, maintaining Overweight. HC Wainwright moved its target to $20 from $9 on September 29, the single largest absolute increase among recent changes. Barclays had already raised to $15 from $13 on September 17. The mean price target across the group now sits at $12.40, which at face value implies a discount to the current $14.45 price. The mean likely lags the most recent revisions, given the pace of changes this week, and the consensus analyst recommendation factor ranks at the 92nd percentile of the coverage universe, meaning the Street tilt is decisively bullish relative to most stocks ORTEX covers. Bears on the fundamental side point to the stock's dependence on a narrow autologous TIL platform, probability-adjusted 2030 revenues of roughly $1.2 billion, and the binary risk profile across multiple clinical indications. Bulls counter with Q2 revenue of $99.3 million, gross margin improved to 56% from 41% in Q1, and an authorized treatment center network on track for at least 110 sites by year-end.
On the institutional side, BlackRock added 5.9 million shares as of August 31 to reach 8.2% of shares outstanding. State Street added 7 million shares in the same period to 5.4%. Both of those builds pre-date the guidance raise and the September short-interest spike. Perceptive Advisors, by contrast, cut its disclosed stake from 7.3% to 3.8% in May, falling below the 5% threshold that triggers ongoing 13D/G reporting obligations. As the disclosure note requires: stakes are as-last-disclosed, and a holder dropping below 5% may not file again.
One data point worth tracking is retail attention. Wikipedia pageview data from Wikimedia Foundation places IOVA's retail interest reading at a z-score of 3.1 against its own 90-day history, the highest attention reading in its recent series. This is an attention signal, not a revenue indicator, and no dataset in this company's alt-data coverage has been measured to lead its reported figures. The next earnings event is scheduled for November 6, 37 days away.
What to watch is whether the short book begins to cover in size now that the stock has broken well above the September trading range, or whether bears use the loosened borrow conditions to rebuild exposure ahead of what remains a binary November print.
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