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RGC enters the week with a sharp contradiction at its centre: the stock has gained 45% over the past month and 11% in the past week alone, yet it remains one of the most expensive shares to borrow on the market, with a cost to borrow running above 300%.
The lending market tells a story of easing pressure but persistent caution. Short interest fell 11% on October 13 and is down 26% on the week, pulling estimated shares short to around 576,000. That retreat came alongside a notable loosening in availability: the share of the lending pool still available to borrow jumped to roughly 40% on October 13, up from 17% to 24% for most of the prior week. A week ago, the borrow market was close to tapped out. Today there is meaningfully more room, though availability has spent much of the past two months below 30%, so the market remains far from easy for new shorts. Cost to borrow, while down 7% on the week, has barely moved in absolute terms: at 304%, it is among the highest of any name on the exchange and has held in a 300% to 355% band for six straight weeks. That level reflects just how difficult and costly it has been to maintain a short position here, and helps explain the short covering seen this week.
Options positioning reinforces the cautious mood around the stock. The put/call ratio at 2.21 is in line with its 20-day average of 2.24 and well above the 52-week low of 0.82, meaning puts substantially outnumber calls and have done so consistently since late September. The z-score near zero tells you this is not a fresh shift in sentiment but an entrenched defensive stance from options traders, one that has been in place even as the stock has rallied hard.
The ORTEX short score sits at 66.4, a level that places RGC in elevated territory for short pressure even as covering has gathered pace. The factor score picture is similarly mixed: the utilization rank of 10 out of 100 confirms the borrow market remains among the tightest in the universe, and the short score rank of 16 means relatively few stocks in the broader universe face as concentrated a short setup. Days to cover on the official FINRA figure ran to 7.3, meaning shorts would need over a week of average volume to unwind fully if the covering accelerated.
Ownership here is highly concentrated in a way that matters for the lending story. Yat-Gai Au holds 88.3% of shares, and a Schedule 13D/A filing from July 2025 shows that stake has grown from 86.2% to 88.6% of the class. With that much of the register locked up, the float available for borrowing is structurally thin, which is why cost to borrow remains extreme even when utilization eases. The institutional register beyond the founder is a handful of names: Alyeska Investment Group initiated a position of 416,000 shares as of June 30, and Legal and General added 118,000 shares in the same period. These are small in the context of the overall share count but large relative to the tradeable float. Stakes are as last disclosed and the picture may have shifted since. Insider filings via SEC EDGAR have no recent activity to report.
Earnings are due October 28. The prior two prints have been punishing: the stock fell 17% on the day after the October 2025 result and shed a further 20% over the following five days, then fell 13% the day after the May 2026 print. The most recent quarterly filing in early October produced only a 3.8% move, though that single datapoint is thin. With the stock having run hard into the report and shorts actively covering, the setup into the next print is worth watching closely.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open RGC 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.
