NuScale Power Corporation reports Q1 earnings on May 7 with a striking tension at its core: the stock is up 17% over the past month, yet short sellers have added aggressively to bearish positions, and a key corporate backer has been liquidating shares at pace.
Short interest now runs at nearly 25% of the free float — the highest level in the past year and up 18% over the past month alone. That expansion is not a gradual drift. From late March through April 23, short interest held in a relatively tight band around 55 million shares. Then, in a single session on April 24, the position jumped to nearly 70 million shares — an increase of roughly 27% overnight — and has held at that elevated level since. The borrow market, however, is not tight. Availability is around 100% of outstanding short interest, and cost to borrow has actually eased over the past week to just 0.60% annualised, down from a recent high above 0.82%. That combination — heavy shorts plus cheap, abundant borrow — points to a conviction-driven short book rather than a forced or squeezed one.
Options traders, by contrast, are leaning bullish. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.56, well below its 20-day average of 0.59 and near the 52-week low of 0.51. That's a meaningful shift from March, when the PCR sat above 0.72 and hedging demand was elevated. Call positioning now outweighs puts by a wide margin. The split between a heavily-shorted name and a call-heavy options market means these two sets of participants are reading the earnings outlook very differently. That divergence — shorts at a record, calls dominant — is the defining tension heading into Thursday's release.
The Street is broadly sceptical about the stock at current levels. The mean analyst price target is $17.00 versus Tuesday's close of $11.87, which implies roughly 43% notional upside. But that headline gap warrants caution: recent analyst activity has been a string of target cuts. B. Riley lowered its target to $19 on April 24 (maintaining Buy), HSBC initiated at Hold with a $13 target on April 23, and Citi reiterated its Sell with a $9 target on April 21. Goldman Sachs and UBS each cut to $14 and $13 in March. The pattern is consistent: even the bulls are scaling back ambitions. The ORTEX short score of 67 ranks in the 4th percentile relative to the broader market — meaning almost the entire market carries less bearish short-positioning pressure than NuScale right now. The company carries no P/E multiple (losses persist), and the price-to-book has risen to 2.35x on the recent price recovery, up from roughly 1.24x a month ago.
The most eye-catching data point this week is not the short interest — it's Fluor Corporation's exit. The engineering giant and 10%+ owner has sold 39.9 million NuScale shares across three tranches between April 9 and April 21, raising approximately $473 million at prices between $11.63 and $12.07. That is a large, rapid liquidation by an insider with detailed operational knowledge of the company. No management buybacks or offsetting purchases from other insiders appear in the same period. On the institutional side, Vanguard added 4.5 million shares in Q1 and Van Eck added 6.2 million in Q4 2025 — index and clean-energy ETF flows rather than high-conviction active bets.
Prior earnings have not been kind to the stock. The February 2026 print produced a 2.5% one-day decline and a 7.6% five-day decline. A December 2025 event saw a 9.6% one-day drop followed by a further 8.3% over the following week. The recent track record is two consecutive negative post-earnings reactions, both extending through the subsequent week. The bull case rests on progress with the Tennessee Valley Authority partnership and demand from AI data centre operators chasing carbon-free baseload power — a theme driving several clean energy peers higher this week, with AMSC up 16% and KULR up 15% over five days. NNE, the closest nuclear-focused peer, fell 4% on the week, a reminder that nuclear-themed names are not moving in lockstep.
What to watch on May 7: whether management can show concrete progress on commercial contract milestones with TVA and ENTRA1, and whether the short book that assembled in a single session on April 24 begins to cover or dig in further after the print.
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