JM AB Shorts Retreat as Stock Climbs to Best Month in Years

JM AB enters the final stretch of Q4 with a rally building and short sellers quietly stepping back, a combination that has pushed the Swedish housebuilder to gains of nearly 10% in a month.

The clearest shift in the lending market is how much room has opened up for new shorts. Availability has loosened to 180%, meaning there are roughly 1.8 shares available to borrow for every share already lent out. That is the most comfortable the borrow pool has been since mid-October, when availability sat below 130%. The lending pool tightened sharply in the second half of October, pushing availability as low as 123% around October 15 to 16, and that squeeze has since fully unwound. Cost to borrow has edged down 12% on the week to 1.39%, though it remains about 20% above where it was a month ago, a residual sign that some demand for shorts persists even as supply has expanded. The ORTEX short score, at 76.7, sits in territory that reflects elevated bearish conviction by the market's standards, yet it has drifted lower from a recent peak near 78.9 on October 26, consistent with shorts trimming rather than adding.

The stock's factor profile is a study in contradictions. The 90-day EPS momentum rank hits the 94th percentile, one of the stronger readings in the homebuilding universe, and the 12-month forward EPS growth rank is similarly impressive at the 86th percentile. Yet the short score rank of 2 and the EV/EBIT factor rank of 3 both sit near the bottom of the market, flagging that the bearish structural argument has not gone away. EV/EBITDA has drifted up about 0.5 turns over the past 30 days to 22.2x, which looks stretched relative to cycle norms for a Nordic housebuilder. The price-to-book has recovered to 0.94x, still fractionally below book value but up roughly 0.08x on the month, tracking the stock's recovery. The mean analyst price target from mid-October points to around SEK 147, which would represent roughly 16% upside to current levels, though that data is now approaching three weeks old and should be treated with some caution.

Ownership in JM is concentrated and mostly Nordic institutional. AMF Fonder holds just under 15% of shares, with its most recent filing showing a cut of about 840,000 shares in July. Janus Henderson, by contrast, appears to have opened an entirely new position worth around 5% of the company as of August, the most notable change in the register over the past six months. Insider activity earlier in the year saw the CEO, CFO, and several board members buy shares in mid-July around SEK 121, with a larger purchase by Jupiter Topco, a 5%-plus owner, in August at SEK 126.50. Net insider activity over the trailing 90 days is negative in aggregate, driven primarily by activity prior to the current quarter, so the overall insider signal is mixed rather than directional.

The most recent earnings print, delivered on October 21, produced a 1-day gain of around 3.5% and a broadly flat five-day outcome. That was a considerably gentler landing than July's quarterly release, which sent the stock down more than 16% on the day and nearly 14% over the following week. Peers have had a reasonable week: BONAV B added 5.4%, HOME gained 8.6%, and KBH climbed 5.8%, suggesting the rally in JM is at least partly a sector move rather than a company-specific re-rating. The next earnings date is scheduled for February 3, 2027.

What to watch next is whether the borrow pool stability holds as the stock approaches the SEK 130 to 135 range, the zone where short interest last visibly built during October's tighter period, and whether the gap between the strong EPS momentum signal and the elevated short score begins to close in either direction.