QURE enters its May 11 quarterly report in a dramatically different position than just weeks ago. The stock has rallied 61% over the past month to $27.66, including a 14.5% single-day jump on May 8 and a 44.6% weekly gain — a violent re-rating that has compressed shorts, scrambled analyst targets, and raised the stakes for the print considerably.
Short sellers are sitting on real pain. At 18% of free float, short interest remains heavy — but it has pulled back about 8% over the past month as the stock ran away from them. The lending market offers no squeeze catalyst to amplify that pressure: availability is loose, and cost to borrow has barely moved, holding near 0.47% annually. Options traders, meanwhile, have positioned firmly for the upside: the put/call ratio is just 0.18, close to the lowest reading of the past year and well below its 20-day average of 0.20. Calls dominate the options book by a wide margin.
Analyst opinion is fractured in a way that reflects genuine uncertainty about the thesis. The bull case rests on AMT-191, QURE's Fabry disease candidate, which has produced durable, dose-dependent results in early data, and on the company's Bristol Myers Squibb partnership in cardiovascular. Chardan raised its target to $37 on April 30, while Mizuho and RBC both upgraded the stock in March to Outperform, citing the pipeline inflection. Wells Fargo went to Overweight with a $60 target in that same burst of optimism. But Goldman Sachs — keeping a Neutral rating — lifted its target only to $10 on April 20, a figure the stock has already blown through by a factor of nearly three. HC Wainwright, a long-standing bull, cut its target from $70 to $50 on May 6 while maintaining Buy — a signal even the optimists are recalibrating after the move. The mean analyst target is $33.66, which leaves only modest upside from current levels after the stock's rapid ascent. The bear case focuses on AMT-130 for Huntington's disease, where the FDA requires a traditional sham-controlled trial — a lengthy and costly path — and on the company's lack of revenue-generating products.
One historical data point sharpens the picture. In March, following a prior earnings event, QURE fell 42% in a single session before recovering 15% over the following five days. That whipsaw shows how binary the stock can be around catalysts. Institutional holders have been adding: State Street built a new position of 1.79 million shares through April 30, JP Morgan added 1.73 million, and Aberdeen increased by 1.63 million — all relatively recent accumulation that suggests conviction on the longer-term gene therapy thesis. Insiders, however, were sellers in early March at prices well below today's, a divergence worth noting.
The May 11 print is therefore less a test of the bull case's ultimate validity and more a question of whether clinical updates on AMT-130 or AMT-191 can justify the stock's violent re-rating — or hand a heavily short-squeezed trade its next turning point.
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