Newmont shorts fade but the stock keeps sliding

Newmont Corporation is now down 7% on the month, the post-earnings selling has not stopped, and the shorts who built positions after the October 22 miss are quietly reducing them.

The most notable shift in the data since last week is the direction of short interest. The post-earnings build that peaked near 18.1 million shares has unwound. Shares short fell roughly 3.5% over the past week to 17.5 million, now representing 1.6% of free float. That is a meaningful reversal for a position that was described a week ago as the sharpest weekly build in months. The lending market remains entirely relaxed: borrow availability is effectively uncapped, cost to borrow has eased to 0.44% from 0.52% last week, and nothing in the lending data suggests any friction for either side of the trade. Options positioning has edged slightly more defensive, with the put/call ratio at 0.79, a touch above its 20-day average of 0.77 but only about one standard deviation from normal. That is a mild lean toward hedging, not a charged setup.

The Street's view has not moved dramatically since the downgrade from Freedom Broker on earnings day. Most major houses held their ratings and trimmed targets only fractionally. Scotiabank nudged its target one dollar lower to $148 on October 27, maintaining Sector Outperform. Citigroup, which raised its target to $140 before the print, still holds a Buy. The consensus mean target is $135.51, implying roughly 26% upside from Wednesday's close of $107.47. That gap has widened as the stock has drifted lower, though the bull case rests on gold prices staying above $3,500 and the bear case prices in $2,500 gold and a share price closer to $41. On valuation, the PE has compressed to around 10.9x and EV/EBITDA to 6.2x, both down over the past 30 days, as the price has moved faster than earnings estimates. The earnings yield factor ranks in the 82nd percentile and EV/EBIT in the 80th, so the market is now pricing the stock more cheaply than it has been, even if forward earnings momentum remains subdued.

One piece of ORTEX Alt Data worth noting: SEC EDGAR filings show Newmont's buyback spend in Q2 2026 came in at $1.57 billion, up 55% on the same quarter a year earlier and the largest Q2 buyback figure on record for the company going back to 2018. The dataset carries no measured lead to revenue or earnings, so it cannot be read as a forward indicator. It does, however, confirm the company was returning capital aggressively in Q2, context worth holding as the stock trades at its lowest level since before that spend was disclosed.

Insider activity is running in the background but carries little signal for new positioning. CEO Natascha Viljoen sold 3,882 shares on November 2 at $108.04, and EVP Peter Toth sold 3,000 shares the same day, both under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans. These are scheduled disposals, not discretionary judgments on value, and the CEO's separate October 30 transaction was an F-code withholding event tied to tax. The 90-day net across all insiders is negative at roughly $4.4 million, almost entirely from these plan-driven sales rather than open-market conviction selling.

The peer group continues to track NEM closely. AEM is down 7.4% on the week, AU off 6.1%, WPM down 7.0%, and IMG off 7.4%. NEM's 4.6% weekly decline is actually the smallest of the group, suggesting the stock has absorbed its company-specific earnings shock and is now trading as a pure gold proxy rather than underperforming on its own story. With the next earnings event not until February 18, the focus from here shifts to gold price direction and whether the Street's target reductions stabilise or extend.