WULF Short Interest Hits a New High Two Days Before Earnings

TeraWulf jumped 14.5% on November 3 to close at $12.53, its biggest single-day gain in months, yet short interest simultaneously climbed to 31.5% of the free float, the highest level recorded in at least a year. That combination, a sharp relief rally running straight into the most crowded bear position on record, is the defining tension two days before the company's Q3 earnings on November 6.

Short positioning has been building steadily through October. Bears held roughly 119 million shares at the start of the month. By November 3 that figure had grown to 131.8 million, putting the short as a percentage of free float at 31.5%, up 2% over the week and nearly 10 percentage points over the past month. The previous note from October 26 flagged 29.1% as the level to watch; the position has since grown by another two points without any sign of covering. What makes this notable is not just the size but the persistence: shorts did not retreat during the sell-off that took the stock from above $15 in September to a low near $11, and they have not covered into Tuesday's bounce either. The borrow market is not signalling imminent squeeze pressure. Availability has tightened materially over the past week, dropping from roughly 110% to 77%, meaning there is still meaningful supply relative to what is already borrowed, though the direction of travel is worth noting. Cost to borrow remains low at 0.66%, up 18.5% on the week but still not at a level that makes maintaining a short expensive.

Options positioning shifted during the same session. The put/call ratio edged up to 0.36 from the near-record-low of 0.32 seen in the October 26 note, moving slightly above its 20-day mean of 0.34. That is still a call-heavy market by historical standards: the 52-week high for the PCR is 0.69, so the current reading remains well below the defensive extreme. The modest drift toward puts alongside a 14.5% daily gain suggests some traders used the rally to buy downside protection ahead of Thursday's print, rather than simply riding the move higher. The ORTEX short score has also climbed, from 69.4 on October 23 to 70.4 on November 3, keeping WULF in the bottom 5th percentile of the universe on that measure.

The Street has been moving in two directions at once. Morgan Stanley's Stephen Byrd raised his Overweight target to $65 on October 12, the highest on the Street by a wide margin. That same week, Cantor Fitzgerald trimmed its Overweight target to $30 from $37, and B. Riley cut its Buy target to $26 from $40 on October 30. The mean price target across the coverage sits at $31.17, which implies roughly 149% upside from Wednesday's close, though the dispersion is unusually wide. The bull case rests on 839MW of contracted AI and HPC capacity tied to Core42, Fluidstack, and a named AI lab, with management citing approximately $27 billion of contracted revenue at buildout. The bear case is blunt: only 102MW of that capacity is actually operational, the balance sheet carries $5.2 billion of total debt plus $360.7 million of letters of credit posted in July, and roughly 45% of the contracted book runs through Fluidstack, whose credit support from Google is structured to protect project debt rather than equity holders. The EV/EBITDA multiple has expanded to 18.8x over the past 30 days even as the stock fell, a combination that reflects deteriorating earnings rather than multiple compression.

On the ownership register, the most newsworthy entry is CEO Paul Prager, who carries an active Schedule 13D filing, confirmed has_13d_activist status on the ORTEX register. His last disclosed stake, as of August 2026, was 10.7% of shares outstanding. Google filed a Schedule 13G in September disclosing a 7.6% passive stake, adding a strategic anchor that the bulls cite as backstop for the Fluidstack arrangement. Vanguard, meanwhile, filed an amendment in March showing it had reduced its position to zero from 8% previously, a material exit that received limited attention at the time. Stakes are as last disclosed around the 5% threshold; holders who drop below that level may not file again.

Wikipedia attention for WULF is running at a z-score of 3.47 relative to its own 90-day history as of late October, a sharply elevated reading that reflects the retail attention spike around the sell-off and subsequent bounce. There are no measured alt-data leads for this company, so that signal is colour rather than any indicator of what the earnings print will show.

The specific thing to watch on November 6 is not the headline numbers but what management says about construction progress on the 737MW still unbuilt. Any update on delivery timelines, particularly for the Fluidstack tranche, will be measured against a short position at its largest recorded level and an options market that is still, despite Tuesday's drift, skewed toward calls.