Middlesex Water Company walks into its May 1 Q1 earnings report with short sellers meaningfully more active than they were a month ago — a notable shift for a utility that rarely attracts aggressive positioning.
The headline number is a 31% jump in short interest over the past week, lifting the SI % of Free Float to 4.3%. That's not extreme by broader market standards, but for a regulated water utility — where predictable cash flows typically attract yield-seekers, not short sellers — the move stands out. The ORTEX short score has climbed from 38.6 on April 22 to 43.5 today, tracking that build-up closely. Despite the jump in shares short, the borrow market remains orderly. Availability is wide, and cost to borrow has edged up only modestly to 0.49% — suggesting this is fresh directional positioning, not a squeeze-driven scramble.
Options traders are not sharing the same urgency. The put/call ratio runs at 0.59, marginally below its 20-day average and well beneath its 52-week high of 0.68. That makes the options market one of the calmer reads on MSEX right now — call interest is proportionally strong, and there's no sign of unusual demand for downside protection ahead of the print. The divergence between rising short positions and flat options hedging is the central tension in the setup.
The analyst picture is thin but directionally mixed. Baird holds an Outperform with a $63 target, above current levels. Freedom Broker's more recent action — raising its target to $55 in February while keeping a Hold — implies limited near-term upside at $60.88 below that level. At $50.88, the stock trades at a P/E of 18.7, with forward earnings momentum ranking in the 83rd percentile on a year-over-year basis. That EPS growth profile is the bull case in a nutshell: regulated growth, visible earnings, a dividend score in the 96th percentile of the universe. Bears are effectively asking whether the recent re-rating is justified if rate case timelines slip or capital costs bite harder than expected.
The sector context is worth noting. Every close peer — CWT, AWR, WTRG, AWK — fell between 2.7% and 6.9% on Wednesday alone, with CWT down 11% on the week. MSEX's own 6.4% weekly drop tracks the peer group sell-off rather than an idiosyncratic story, which complicates the read on the short interest build: some of that positioning may be sector-level rather than company-specific.
The Q1 print will test whether MSEX's earnings trajectory — strong on a forward basis — can hold its premium to peers at a moment when the entire water utilities space is under pressure.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open MSEX on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
