Skye Bioscience reports Thursday with short sellers notably less convicted than they were a month ago.
Short interest has fallen sharply. The position dropped 20% over the past week alone to 3.8% of the free float — down from roughly 5% in mid-April — suggesting bears who built up around the Phase 2a nimacimab data window have been covering rather than pressing. Borrowing conditions are relaxed: cost to borrow has eased to 7.5% from above 9% in early April, and availability in the lending pool remains ample, with borrow utilization near only 33% — well below the 100% reading seen at the 52-week peak. There is no squeeze dynamic here.
Options positioning reinforces that picture. Call activity dominates. The put/call ratio has drifted down to 0.60, roughly one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.64 — an unusual lean toward calls for a pre-clinical-stage biotech heading into a catalyst. The stock itself has been volatile: up 25% over the past month but down 18% on the week before a 6% bounce Monday. At $0.87, it is a long way from even the most conservative analyst target.
The analyst consensus remains firmly bullish in direction, though all coverage is stale — the most recent initiation on record dates to September 2025, when HC Wainwright opened with a Buy and a $20 target. Prior initiations from Evercore ISI (Outperform, $10) and JMP Securities (Market Outperform, $15) also date back more than six months. No analyst has updated their view since the March 2026 full-year results. Given a current price of $0.87 against a mean target of $10.33, that gap is so wide it reflects these targets' age rather than credible near-term upside — investors should treat the consensus as directional sentiment only, not a valuation anchor.
The bull case centers on nimacimab's peripheral CB1 mechanism and what its differentiated tolerability profile — particularly vs. GLP-1 agonists — could mean for obesity and metabolic liver disease. Bears point to persistent operating losses, the binary nature of Phase 2a readouts, and the historical toxicity concerns that dogged earlier CB1 antagonists. The ORTEX short score of 54, while elevated in absolute terms, has been falling — it peaked near 64 in mid-April and has trended down since — aligning with the covering activity in SI data. The EPS surprise factor score of 74 is a relative bright spot, though for a pre-revenue biotech it reflects analyst estimate management more than fundamental output.
The May 8 print is therefore less a financial results event and more a clinical narrative update — what management says about nimacimab trial enrollment, interim biomarker data, and cash runway will determine whether the covering trend in short interest continues or reverses sharply.
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