The borrow market for WOK has effectively shut. Short interest in WORK Medical Technology Group exploded 751% in a single week. The stock itself tripled — and short sellers are paying dearly to stay in the trade.
Short interest hit 57% of free float on May 11. One week earlier, it sat below 8%. That is an eight-fold increase in positions against a stock that simultaneously rallied 187% over the same period.
Cost to borrow tells the same story. CTB stood at roughly 35% for most of April. It closed at 125.2% on May 11 — a 248% jump in seven days. Short sellers borrowing stock today pay that rate annually just to maintain the position.
Availability has collapsed to near zero. The lending pool is 99% drawn down — essentially every share available to borrow has already been lent out. There is almost no room left for new short positions to be established at current supply levels. This is the tightest the borrow market has been all year, matching the 52-week high of 100% utilization reached earlier.
WOK shares closed at $3.92 on May 11. That is a 206% single-day gain and a 201% move over the past month. Yet short interest kept climbing even as the stock surged.
That combination — rising SI into a rising price — is the definition of a contested trade. Shorts added aggressively this week at the same time buyers pushed the stock higher. Neither side blinked.
The ORTEX short score stands at 68.98. That ranks in the 5th percentile among short score peers — meaning WOK carries one of the more extreme short positioning profiles in the dataset.
The institutional holder count is just three firms. The largest, UBS Asset Management, holds around 2,400 shares — representing 0.2% of shares outstanding. This is a thinly held name. Thin ownership means fewer natural lenders. Fewer lenders mean the borrow pool shrinks faster when demand spikes.
That structural thinness amplifies every move in the lending market.
What to watch: Whether new borrow supply enters the market. With availability near zero and CTB already at 125%, any incremental demand for shorts has nowhere to go without pushing costs higher still. If supply does not materialise, the pressure on existing short positions will intensify.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open WOK on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
