KNRX: Shorts pile in as borrow costs spike and stock slides

KNRX enters May having delivered its most dramatic shift in short positioning of the past six months — all compressed into a single session.

The most striking development this week was Thursday's explosion in short interest. Estimated shares short jumped roughly 977% in one day on April 30, lifting SI as a percentage of the free float from under 0.03% to 3.2%. That reading is new territory for this stock: through all of April, daily short interest had been tracking in a narrow band of 0.02% to 0.31% of float. Something changed sharply at the end of the month, and the borrow market immediately reflected it.

The lending picture tells the same story, only louder. Cost to borrow hit 90% annualised on April 30 — up 140% over the week — and availability has tightened dramatically to match. The share of the lending pool already lent out climbed to 91%, close to the 52-week peak of 99%. That means for every ten shares in the pool, nine are already out on loan. Borrow was actually far more expensive earlier in the year — it was running above 370% in mid-March and only dropped sharply through April as short positions were unwound. The recent reversal, with CTB nearly tripling from the late-April lows of roughly 35%, signals that new short demand is arriving fast and supply is not keeping up. The ORTEX short score reflects this: it jumped from 44 at the start of the week to 64.8 on April 30, its highest reading in the available history.

The price action compounds the pressure. The stock is down 14% over the past week to close at $1.02, and down 21% over the past month. That is a notable move for a small AMEX-listed ad-tech company with a market cap that does not show up on the main valuation screens. The timing of the short-interest surge — arriving as the stock already was sliding — means late-arriving shorts are entering at a materially lower price than the sellers of a month ago, when CTB was four times higher. On the product side, Knorex announced an AI-powered keyword optimizer for Google Ads and an ML-based attribution model on April 29 — a headline that did nothing to arrest the week's decline.

Ownership is tightly concentrated. The top two names, Si Wan Zhong and Khar Heng Choo, together hold roughly 26% of shares. Raffles Venture Partners adds another 10%, and a new filer, Vd Capital Pty Ltd, reported a fresh 8.2% stake as of March 18. With so much of the float locked up in a handful of holders, the effective tradeable float is small — a factor that can amplify moves in either direction when short positioning shifts as abruptly as it did this week.

Earnings are next scheduled for June 12. The last reported print, in December 2025, produced a one-day drop of 3.4%. The question heading into that date is whether the borrow market stays this tight — or whether the new short positions that entered at month-end begin to close as availability continues to tighten toward last year's 99% peak.