Quoin Pharmaceuticals heads into its May 7 earnings event with the lending market completely dried up — a structural tension that sits at the heart of the current setup.
Every share available to borrow has been lent out. Availability has dropped to zero, hitting its tightest point in at least a year, and the cost to borrow has held well above 190% APR for most of the past month. Short interest has climbed sharply, rising 36% over the past week and 75% over the past month to reach 9.4% of the free float. That's a meaningful and rapidly accelerating short position in a stock with a very thin float. The ORTEX short score has moved to 70 — a high reading that reflects the combination of rising short interest and near-total exhaustion of the borrow pool. The stock itself closed at $6.36, up 16% on the week but still down 9% over the prior month, suggesting a volatile and choppy tape.
The bull case rests on pipeline progress — Lucid Capital Markets initiated coverage on May 4 with a Buy rating and a $30 target, the only formal sell-side view on record. At $6.36, that implies roughly 4.7x upside. That is a wide gap, and readers should note the initiation is a single, non-bellwether firm; the price target divergence from current levels is large enough to warrant independent scrutiny. Bears, by contrast, point to the company's deeply negative earnings yield and EV, its history of sharp post-earnings declines, and the fact that short sellers have been aggressively adding exposure even as the stock bounced. The EV/EBIT factor ranks in the 95th percentile of extremity — a reflection of how far the fundamentals sit from conventional valuation anchors.
The post-earnings record is uneven and at times severe. The most recent print, in late March, produced a one-day drop of nearly 31% and a five-day loss of 24%. The event before that, in late 2025, saw an initial one-day gain of 14% followed by a 19% drawdown over the subsequent week. Institutional ownership is notable for its concentration: the top holder controls nearly 12% of shares, and several funds — including Stonepine, Woodline, and Aberdeen — added meaningful positions in recent quarters. That concentration can amplify moves in either direction when a catalyst lands.
The May 7 print will test whether the recent short accumulation and borrow exhaustion reflect well-founded caution about the pipeline update, or whether the squeeze dynamics in a fully borrowed-out float force a rapid unwind.
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