KULR enters Thursday's Q1 2026 earnings call with a stock up 48% in a month, options traders at their most bullish in a year — and a short position that hasn't budged.
The rally is the dominant fact this week. KULR closed at $3.19 on Tuesday, up 14% from Monday's open and 48% over the past month. The move comes with genuine news behind it. On April 29, KULR announced initial purchase orders totalling around $1 million from a federal defense technology firm, with a total customer opportunity cited at over $5 million for 2026. The same week, the company added a Microsoft AI director to its board. Those two catalysts were enough to shift the narrative — and the price.
Options traders have noticed. The put/call ratio collapsed to 0.14 on May 12, the lowest reading in the past year and more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.21. That's the most one-sided bullish tilt in options flow KULR has seen in at least twelve months, with the 52-week low in PCR now sitting exactly where it landed this week. Borrow availability is very tight — the lending pool has been nearly fully drawn for weeks, with utilisation running consistently above 92% and touching 100% earlier in the year. Cost to borrow has drifted up 13% over the past month to around 9%, reflecting persistent demand from short sellers who have not retreated.
Short sellers are, in fact, holding firm — and that's the key tension heading into Thursday. SI as a percentage of free float came in at nearly 21%, and the week-on-week change was actually an increase of around 3%. That is a notable detail: despite a stock up 48% over the month, shorts have added exposure rather than covered. The absolute short position has hovered between 19.6% and 21% of the float for the entire past six weeks, a range that has barely moved. ORTEX's short score of 81 ranks in the first percentile of all stocks — an extreme reading that flags this as one of the most heavily contested names in the universe. Days to cover, per the FINRA fortnightly data, stand at 7.4.
The institutional picture adds another layer. BlackRock recently added 144,000 shares to reach a 5.4% stake. Vanguard added 195,000 shares, now at 4.5% of the company. Those are index-style flows, but they're incremental buyers into a stock where CEO and Chairman Michael Mo trimmed his holding by roughly 832,000 shares in recent filings — a reduction that still leaves him as the third-largest holder at just under 4% of shares outstanding. The CFO sold a small $42,000 parcel in April. None of the insider activity is dramatic in dollar terms, but the directional signal from management has been one-way: out.
The earnings backdrop frames everything. When KULR reported Q4 2025 results on March 31, the stock fell 6.9% the next day and ended the five-day window essentially flat. The full-year numbers showed revenue growing to $16.2 million from $10.7 million — but the net loss widened sharply to $61.9 million from $17.5 million a year earlier, as spending scaled faster than revenue. Q1 2026 results arrive Thursday at 4:00 p.m. ET with an analyst call at 4:30 p.m. For a stock where shorts have held a 21% float position through a 48% rally, the print is the pressure test.
Among close peers, NNE gained 19% on the week and HYLN gained 16%, suggesting the broader group caught a bid. STEM fell 16%, the outlier to the downside. KULR's 14% week was roughly in line with the group's better performers — but the short interest dynamic is distinctly KULR-specific. The question Thursday is whether revenue and loss trends narrow enough to push short sellers toward the exits, or whether a repeat of the March reaction gives them reason to stay.
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