POET Technologies delivered one of the week's most jarring price swings — a 30% surge on May 5 to $9.21, up 51% over the past month — arriving on the same day a wave of securities class action lawsuits landed at its doorstep.
The catalyst for Wednesday's jump is the clearest signal in the data. A "Why is it Moving" item rated maximum importance (10/10) was filed May 6, and separately, at least five law firms — Bronstein Gewirtz, Faruqi & Faruqi, Rosen, Robbins, and Pomerantz — filed or reminded investors of a class action alleging investor harm related to tax disclosures and an NDA breach. The lead plaintiff deadline is June 29. That legal backdrop ordinarily weighs on a stock; instead, POET rallied hard, suggesting the catalyst driving buyers was separate from the litigation news and powerful enough to overpower it.
The borrow market tells the full story of a short position that peaked, then scrambled. Availability tightened to an extreme during the final week of April — falling as low as 6.6% on April 28, meaning barely one share was available for every fifteen already borrowed — with short interest peaking at roughly 10.7% of the free float. That was the squeeze setup: borrow costs climbed to 8.3% APR on April 30, the highest of the recent cycle, against a prior-month baseline near 1%. Then the stock ran. By May 5, shorts had covered materially; short interest fell from a peak of ~16.4 million estimated shares on April 28 back to 12.5 million, a drop of roughly 24% in a week. Availability has since loosened to 52% — still tight relative to the broader market, but far from the near-empty pool seen just days earlier. Borrowing costs have eased to 4.5%, off the highs. The short score, sitting at 61.6, reflects a position that is still meaningfully elevated but no longer at the extreme of a week ago.
Options positioning has shifted alongside the move. The put/call ratio has climbed to 0.21, roughly 1.25 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.15, and close to its 52-week high of 0.23. That is not a panic reading, but it does suggest some participants are buying protection at the current elevated price — a change in tone from the call-heavy positioning that dominated through most of April, when the PCR ran near 0.10.
The Street angle offers limited fresh guidance. Analyst data is stale — the most recent rating change on record is from Northland Capital Markets in December 2024, when a target of $7.00 was reiterated alongside an Outperform, and Craig-Hallum maintained Buy with a $5.50 target in November 2024. With the stock now at $9.21 and a mean price target of $8.20, the stock is trading above what the two covering analysts last publicly modelled. That gap matters more than usual given the litigation overhang: the Street has not had a chance to publicly reset targets to reflect either the recent run or the class action filings. The EPS surprise factor score ranks at the 97th percentile — POET has consistently beaten estimates — which may help explain why buyers were not deterred by the legal headlines.
Insider activity over the past six months skews clearly to the sell side. The CFO sold over $4 million of stock across two tranches in October 2025. A non-executive director offloaded 171,000 shares for $1.3 million around the same time. The most recent logged transactions, from March 2026, show the controller and a chief-level officer selling combined. Net insider activity over the 90 days to mid-March was a modest $400,000 of net selling — small in absolute terms but directionally consistent with the broader pattern of insiders reducing exposure as the stock climbed from sub-$2 levels a year ago.
Peer AEHR on Nasdaq gained 6.5% on Tuesday and is up 10.6% on the week — a broadly constructive backdrop for the semiconductor space. Close correlation peer MX surged 14.6% Tuesday but has lost 16% on the week, a reminder that single-session moves in this cohort can be sharp and short-lived. The next confirmed event for POET is scheduled for August 12. Between now and then, the class action deadline on June 29, the pace of short covering, and any analyst response to the legal filings are the variables most worth tracking.
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