HPAI enters the weekend having shed 33% over five sessions — a collapse that draws attention not to crowded shorts but to a lending market that is quietly loosening after months of extreme tightness.
The most striking development this week is the borrow cost story going in the opposite direction from the stock. Cost to borrow has halved from its April peak — it ran above 100% APR throughout most of April, touching 140% on April 8 at the tightest point. It has since retreated to 67%, the lowest level of the past six weeks. Availability has eased alongside it, now running near 92% of short interest — meaning lenders are sitting on more idle supply relative to the shares already borrowed than at any point during the April squeeze. The lending market has definitively loosened, even as the price falls.
Short interest remains small in absolute terms. HPAI's SI % of free float is just over 1%, and the gross share count of roughly 79,000 shares shorted is tiny relative to the stock's float. What is notable is the trend: short interest has tripled over the past month, up more than 200% since early April. The week-on-week jump of 9%, with a single-day spike of 21% on May 7, points to fresh positioning being added into the decline. Yet even tripling from a minimal base leaves short positioning far below the level that would define crowded — this is opportunistic shorting, not a deep structural bear thesis.
The ORTEX short score of 61 reflects the recent buildup. It held in the low-to-mid 60s through most of late April, dipped briefly to 56 mid-week before bouncing back above 60 by May 7. That middling reading aligns with the data: short interest is rising and borrow costs have normalised, but the absolute positioning level and current availability don't yet suggest a mechanically stressed setup.
Ownership is heavily concentrated. Five named insiders — led by Fan Yu with roughly 51.5% of shares — account for the overwhelming majority of the float. Institutional presence is minimal; State Street and a handful of smaller managers hold fractional positions under 0.2%. That concentration means the float is extremely thin, which likely explains why borrow costs were able to spike above 100% in the first place, and why even modest short-selling activity registers as a percentage increase.
The earnings calendar shows the next event on June 26. Prior prints have not been kind: the most recent, on April 13, produced a 2% one-day drop and a 3% five-day loss. The January result was worse — down nearly 6% on the day and 11% over the following week. The single exception in the trailing four events was a 16% pop in November 2025, though that proved short-lived with the next quarter reversing sharply. The pattern that emerges is one of consistent post-earnings selling pressure after initial relief.
What to watch is whether short interest continues building toward a level that starts to exert real mechanical pressure on the thin float, and whether borrow costs stabilise or drift higher again as availability tightens — the spread between current availability and the April squeeze highs is wide enough that there remains room for the lending market to tighten materially before June's earnings.
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