POET Technologies has doubled in price over the past month and added 49% this week alone — but into that rally, short sellers are piling in at the fastest pace in months while securities class-action lawsuits multiply by the day.
Short interest has become the defining tension on this name. It climbed nearly 35% over the past week to 12% of the free float, accelerating from roughly 10.5% at the start of May. That five-session build of more than 2.6 million shares is one of the sharpest weekly accumulations the stock has seen, and it arrives while the stock is trading near multi-month highs at $13.73. The borrow market is tightening to match: availability has dropped to just 21% of short interest, meaning for every five shares already borrowed, barely one more is left in the lending pool. Cost to borrow has eased from its late-April peak above 8% to a still-elevated 4.2% — far above the sub-1% rates that prevailed through most of April. The ORTEX short score has climbed to 64.4, its highest reading of the current ten-day window, and ranks in the fifth percentile of the universe — a sign the aggregate pressure signals are unusually strong.
The fuel for the rally is identifiable. POET announced a new Chief Operating Officer appointment and disclosed a $5 million order win, two concrete operational milestones for a company still in early commercialisation of its optical interposer platform. The stock's EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 97th percentile, reflecting a history of beating estimates, and the most recent earnings print on May 6 produced a 4% single-day gain. Prior events have been more dramatic: the April 10 report generated a 20% next-day move, and both the March and November 2025 prints each produced 10%-plus reactions with five-day follow-through above 17%. The next scheduled event is August 12, giving the current setup time to play out.
What complicates the story is the legal backdrop. Multiple securities fraud class-action lawsuits have been filed in recent days — Bronstein Gewirtz, Levi & Korsinsky, Kirby McInerney, Bernstein Liebhard, and Rosen Law Firm all appear in filings dated this week, with a lead-plaintiff deadline of June 29, 2026. The company also faces a shareholder vote and a production ramp through June, creating a dense calendar of potential catalysts and pressure points. Insider activity provides no counter-signal: the most recent on-record trades, from March 2026, were sales by the Controller and a C-level officer, and the prior cluster in October 2025 also ran entirely sell-side — the CFO alone moved more than $4 million worth of stock at prices well below today's $13.73.
The analyst record on POET is effectively stale. The most recent price-target action on file dates to December 2024, when Northland Capital Markets reiterated Outperform with a $7.00 target and Craig-Hallum held Buy at $5.50. Both figures are far below the current price, and no update has been filed since. Until coverage firms revisit their numbers, the Street's formal positioning offers little guidance at current levels. The valuation data similarly lags — the stock carries a negative P/E reflecting pre-profitability status, and a price-to-book reading that has moved sharply with the share-price gains.
Options positioning has shifted alongside the price surge. The put/call ratio moved to 0.29, its highest reading of the past year, against a 20-day mean of 0.18. At 1.7 standard deviations above average, it marks a notable rise in defensive hedging — though the absolute ratio remains modest, reflecting a stock where call activity still dominates the options tape. Peer semiconductors like RMBS and PDFS each gained around 10% on the week, but MX and FORM both fell, keeping sector-level tailwinds mixed rather than uniform.
The June calendar — combining the shareholder vote, a production ramp, and the class-action lead-plaintiff deadline — is the next concrete forcing event for this setup.
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