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SSW heads into the week of October 7 with a sharp disconnect between a rapidly loosening borrow market and a share price that has shed more than 20% in a month.
The most striking development in the lending market is how quickly the borrow squeeze has unwound. Availability tightened dramatically through mid-to-late September, dropping to 50.1% on September 25, the tightest reading of the past year, meaning there was only one share available to borrow for every two already lent out. Cost to borrow peaked near 6.8% around the same time. Both have since reversed hard. Availability has loosened back to 140%, and the borrow cost has collapsed by two-thirds over the past month to under 0.9%, now firmly in low territory. The short score tells the same story: it peaked at 61.7 on September 25 and has retreated to 55.5, still above neutral but well off the highs. The direction of travel suggests the most aggressive wave of short positioning has passed, at least for now.
What makes the borrow-market reversal notable is that the stock has not followed it higher. SSW closed at R41.15 on October 6, down 0.7% on the week and down more than 20% over the past month. Peers have also had a rough week. NPH fell 4.3% and IMP dropped 4.3% over the same period, while GFI and HAR lost 1.4% and 3.9% respectively. WPM was an exception, adding 2% on the week, suggesting gold-streaming names are holding up better than the primary miners. SSW's underperformance relative to its peer group is not new, as noted in recent ORTEX analysis, but the gap has widened further.
Valuation has compressed alongside the price. The stock trades at a price-to-book of 1.72, down 0.65 points over the past 30 days, and a PE of 4.1. The EV/EBITDA multiple is running at 2.5. These are inexpensive readings in absolute terms, and the forward EPS growth factor score ranks in the 77th percentile, reflecting a meaningful earnings recovery embedded in estimates. The dividend score ranks in the 98th percentile, though the last declared dividend on record dates to early 2022, so investors should not treat that score as a near-term income signal. The short score rank of 8 and the days-to-cover rank of 6 flag that the stock remains among the more heavily shorted names in its universe, even after the recent easing.
Insider activity through the first half of 2026 has been persistently on the buy side. Executive director and prescribed officer C. Keyter made two purchases totalling roughly 384,000 shares in March, with a further 200,000 shares added in late June. Executive director Richard Stewart added over 41,000 shares in March. The board chairman and several other prescribed officers also bought smaller lines in the same period. Net insider buying over the past 90 days amounts to 215,000 shares, worth approximately R7.9 million. None of the recent trades carry a significance score above 3 out of 10, and the most recent is dated to late June, so this is not a fresh signal. Still, the consistency of buying from multiple insiders while the stock was already under pressure through 2026 is a pattern worth tracking.
Earnings are scheduled for November 12. The most recent comparable release, in September 2026, produced a one-day move of plus 7.1% and a five-day move of plus 10.8%. The June 2026 print went the other direction, with a one-day decline of 6.5% and a five-day loss of 9.3%. With the borrow squeeze now largely unwound and the stock near multi-month lows, the November print is shaping up as the next meaningful test of whether the insider buying and compressed valuation attract fresh demand or whether macro and commodity headwinds continue to dominate the narrative.
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