LIFE has staged one of the sharper rallies in its short trading history — up 77% over the past month and 17% in this week alone, closing at $21.05 on Tuesday. The tension worth watching: short sellers are rebuilding positions into that strength, and the borrow market is quietly tightening around them.
Short interest has climbed to 8.1% of the free float, up from roughly 7.3% a month ago and rising about 11% in shares over the past week. That is a meaningful level for a recently-listed insurance technology name. More telling is what is happening in the lending market. Availability has tightened sharply over the last two weeks, dropping from around 100% in late April to just 49% now — meaning there is barely one share available to borrow for every two already on loan. That is the tightest the pool has been since mid-April, when it briefly touched 39%. Cost to borrow has moved in lockstep, more than doubling from under 2% in late March to 9.4% today, reflecting genuine competition for available stock. Together, the picture is one of a lending market under meaningful pressure — not a crisis, but increasingly constrained for anyone looking to establish new short positions.
The ORTEX short score reinforces the cautious read. It has climbed steadily to 67.9 — a level that flags elevated bearish positioning relative to the broader universe, and its highest point in at least the past two weeks. Yet the stock's RSI of 86 tells the other side: momentum buyers have been firmly in control. The P/E multiple has expanded rapidly, adding more than five points over the past month as the price surged. A P/B of 3.9x and EV/EBITDA of 5.3x are not stretched by any absolute measure, but the pace of re-rating is notable. The next earnings event is pencilled in for June 5.
The Street's read on Ethos has been broadly constructive since the stock began trading. A wave of initiations around the February IPO brought in Buy and Overweight ratings across most major firms, with Deutsche Bank setting the highest published target at $23 and Goldman Sachs at $33. The consensus mean target was $20.25 as of early March — a figure the stock has now surpassed. Note that these targets are roughly three months old, and the stock has moved significantly since they were set; the upside implied by older, lower targets ($13–$15 range) looks stale against the current price. The analyst return potential figure of -3.8% reflects this — on aggregate, the Street's published targets are now marginally below where the stock trades.
The prior earnings print on February 25 is the only clean reaction data available. The stock rose 7.3% the following day and 18% over the subsequent five trading sessions — a strong post-results pattern for a newly public company. That momentum may have seeded the current positioning: shorts building into strength, borrow tightening, and a short score that has drifted materially higher through April and into May. The June 5 earnings date is the next focal point, and the setup — a heavily extended stock, rising short interest, and a tightening lending pool — makes that print a sharper-than-usual test of whether the post-IPO enthusiasm is tracking the underlying fundamentals.
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