Smart Powerr Corp. enters mid-May in a position that feels almost contradictory: short positions have collapsed, yet borrowing the stock remains extraordinarily expensive.
The sharpest tension in the data is in the lending market. Cost to borrow has eased off its peak but is still running at 326%, down from a remarkable 705% in late April. That is not a typo. For weeks, lenders were demanding more than seven times the stock price in annualised fees to facilitate a short position. Even at current levels, the borrow cost is roughly three times where it was at the start of April (108% on April 1). This kind of sustained, elevated CTB is almost always a signal that available shares in the lending pool are scarce relative to demand — and borrow availability has recently loosened dramatically, with the lending pool now only about 14% utilised, down from readings near 99% in mid-to-late April.
What happened in between explains a great deal. Short interest peaked near 2.7 million shares in early-to-mid April, with the lending pool virtually fully tapped out and CTB above 600%. Since then, shorts have unwound aggressively. Estimated short interest has fallen to around 493,000 shares — roughly 2.4% of the free float — a drop of more than 75% from the April peak. The rapid exodus of short sellers explains why availability has loosened so sharply: the borrowers returned their shares, freeing up the lending pool. CTB tends to lag this unwind, which is why it remains elevated even as availability has opened back up.
The ORTEX short score reflects this shift. It has dropped to 48.1, down from a peak above 69 in late April when the squeeze-like conditions were at their tightest. The DTC factor rank is elevated at 90, reflecting that short interest relative to average daily volume remains significant even at reduced levels. The short score rank sits at just 27, meaning the bearish positioning signal is now well below median compared to the broader universe.
The stock itself tells a volatile story. CREG closed at $0.254 on May 12, a gain of nearly 42% on the day — yet still down more than 51% on the week and almost 60% over the past month. That combination points to a high-volatility, low-liquidity micro-cap that has been caught in a squeeze-and-release cycle. The market cap data is absent from the snapshot, which is itself a flag: this is an extremely small company where even modest share flows move prices sharply. Recent earnings reactions corroborate the volatility: the April 2026 print produced a 5-day move of +34%, while the event in November 2025 saw a 5-day decline of over 11%.
There is no useful options data (the available options history dates to 2016 and is stale). Analyst coverage, insider activity, and institutional holdings are similarly dated or negligible — the institutional holder count stands at just four names, with Citadel's position of 75,000 shares (added in full at end of 2025) the most recently initiated. None of these carry enough weight in the current setup to drive the narrative. The factor score picture is sparse: a dividend score of 28 and a sector rank of 50 offer little signal.
The dynamic to watch now is whether CTB continues to normalise toward lower levels as availability holds open, or whether a fresh catalyst prompts shorts to re-enter and compress the lending pool again — the stock has shown it can move sharply in either direction when that cycle tightens.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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