WULF Holds Up Better Than Peers, but 29% Short Interest Won't Budge

TeraWulf slipped 9.1% this week to $12.01, a rough number in isolation, but the peer group fared far worse: CIFR dropped 21.7%, BTBT fell 25.6%, IREN lost 23.5%, and KEEL shed 18.5%. The relative outperformance is real, yet it obscures a stubborn problem: short sellers who accumulated through September have still not moved.

The short position is the defining overhang. Bears hold 28.8% of the free float, roughly 120.7 million shares, down less than 0.3% on the week and barely changed from the month's high. That position was built during September's brief rally and has not been meaningfully covered despite a 29% one-month price decline. The borrow market offers no squeeze mechanism to force their hand: cost to borrow has eased to 0.58%, down 6% on the week, and availability has loosened to 106%, meaning there is more supply of lendable shares than there are shares currently borrowed. That is a market where new short positions can be added cheaply and without friction. The ORTEX short score of 69.2 places WULF in the sixth percentile for short-score rank, flagging the stock as one of the more heavily shorted names in the universe. Options traders are actually leaning bullish by recent standards: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.33, more than a standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.35, and is close to its 52-week low of 0.32. That divergence, options buyers tilting toward calls while short sellers sit tight, is the tension that defines the current setup.

The Street remains structurally bullish but increasingly split on price. The consensus mean target is $32.80, implying more than 170% upside from current levels. That number hides a wide range. Morgan Stanley carried its Overweight and raised its target to $65 on October 12, while Cantor Fitzgerald maintained Overweight but cut from $37 to $30 the following week. TD Cowen started coverage at Buy with a $21 target on the same day. The cluster of new targets between $19 and $30 reflects the bear case in numbers: 737MW of the contracted 839MW is still to be built, the company carries $5.2 billion of debt, and share count has grown 27% in eleven months to 499 million. A $755.7 million non-cash warrant charge distorted the Q2 GAAP loss, but the adjusted EBITDA of negative $18.3 million for the quarter shows the business is still pre-cash-flow positive on its new strategy. EV/EBITDA has compressed to 18.1x, down 1.7 turns over the past month, reflecting the price slide rather than any change in the earnings base.

The ownership register carries one fact that stands out. Google filed a Schedule 13G on September 25, disclosing a 7.6% stake worth roughly 41 million shares. CEO Paul Prager holds a Schedule 13D position, the most recent filing disclosing 10.7% as of August 2025, though that figure is as last disclosed and the current level is unknown given that the 13D/G register is event-driven around the 5% threshold. Lone Pine Capital reported a 5.1% passive stake in April. Against that, the insider net over 90 days is negative: roughly $5.1 million in net sales, led by Prager's $2.3 million disposal in late August under a 10b5-1 plan and director Walter Carter's $2.0 million open-market sale in late August. Director Michael Bucella made two small open-market purchases totalling around $140,000 in August and September, a token counterweight.

Earnings are due November 6. The past two prints each produced a one-day decline of 6.7% to 8.0%, with the five-day move after the August 7 report ending at negative 1.3%, and the five-day move after the August 5 event settling at negative 9.0%. The question for that release is whether deployed capacity has moved materially beyond the 102MW figure cited for Q2, and whether the Fluidstack campus financing has reached the investment-grade credit support the company has described. Those are the two numbers that close the gap between the $65 bull case and the $21 initiation target, and neither is visible before the print.