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United Therapeutics heads into its October 28 earnings report with shorts making their most aggressive repositioning of the quarter, even as the stock edges marginally higher on the week.
The short interest story is the standout this week. Shares short have climbed 34% in seven days to 8.5% of the free float, and are up 73% over the past month. The move started sharply around October 7 to 8, when estimated short shares jumped from roughly 2.7 million to 3.6 million in a single session. That acceleration has continued through this week. Despite the volume of new short positions, the borrow market remains wide open: availability runs at nearly 2,785%, meaning there are roughly 28 shares available to borrow for every one already lent out. Borrowing cost has risen 40% on the week but stays at just 0.46%, barely above the risk-free rate. The ORTEX short score, which integrates these signals, jumped from the low 44s to just under 50 this week, a meaningful shift upward even if the absolute level remains in neutral territory.
Options positioning has shifted in the same direction, though less dramatically. The put/call ratio at 0.82 sits slightly below its 20-day average of 0.87, meaning the current reading is marginally more call-heavy than recent norms. That is a small divergence from the short interest signal: shorts are rebuilding, but the options market is not yet pricing in pronounced downside protection ahead of the print. The 52-week PCR range runs from 0 to 1.82, so the current level is far from extreme in either direction.
The Street remains deeply divided, and last week's note on UTHR captured the core of that tension accurately. The picture has since sharpened slightly in the bull direction. RBC Capital raised its target to $708 from $677 on October 8, maintaining Outperform. That follows BTIG's October 1 Buy initiation at $728. Against those, Goldman Sachs sits at Sell with a $321 target, initiated on September 24, a level 41% below the current price of $543. The consensus mean target runs to $651, roughly 20% above current levels. EPS momentum over 30 days ranks in the 92nd percentile of the ORTEX universe, the strongest single factor score in the snapshot. The PE multiple has pulled back about 1.1 points over the past week to 16.8x, and EV/EBITDA is broadly flat over the same period. The bull case centers on UTHR's dominant prostacyclin franchise in pulmonary arterial hypertension and a pipeline that includes a treprostinil soft mist inhaler. The bear case, which Goldman's initiation made explicit, rests on uncertainty about whether Tyvaso's mechanism translates into a genuine IPF treatment or whether it is simply managing accompanying pulmonary vascular disease, a distinction with significant commercial consequences.
One flag worth noting on the ownership side: CEO Martine Rothblatt executed a series of open-market sales on October 12, filing net sales of roughly $5.2 million in aggregate across multiple transactions that day. All were conducted under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, which reduces the informational content, but the timing, two weeks before earnings and during a period when short interest is rising sharply, is worth registering. Rothblatt continues to hold 668,728 shares (around 1.56% of the company). BlackRock added nearly 100,000 shares in the most recently reported quarter, bringing its stake to 12.3%. State Street also added 108,519 shares in Q3. Wellington Management, meanwhile, filed a 13G/A in August showing its stake fell from 5.7% to 3.2%, a material reduction from a firm that had been a long-term holder.
Separately, Medicaid prescription data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows prescriptions for the company's tracked products have fallen for three consecutive quarters, with the most recent quarter at 5,208 prescriptions. Medicaid reimbursement dollars for the same period were down 11% versus Q1 a year earlier. These are government channel figures and do not capture commercial dynamics, but the streak is three quarters long now.
The October 28 print arrives with UTHR up 9% over the past month and the short base rebuilt to its highest level in at least six weeks. Whether the short rebuild is covering Tyvaso-IPF risk or something else in the quarterly figures is what the print will resolve.
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Open UTHR on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
