Absci Corporation heads into its June 4 earnings report with short sellers in measured retreat and an analyst upgrade providing fresh upside context — while options traders turned their most call-heavy in months.
The headline shift this week is that shorts are covering. SI % FF has fallen to 22.1% from a peak above 26% in early April, a sustained six-week unwind that has taken roughly 5 million shares out of the short book. The pace has been steady rather than violent: no single-day explosion, just a gradual bleed-down that now leaves net short interest at its lowest level of the past two months. Days to cover is still elevated at around 9.9, meaning any sharp move higher would take almost two weeks of average volume to cover the remaining position. That overhang is real.
The lending market tells a looser story. Cost to borrow has more than halved from its early-April peak near 1.84% and sits at 0.92% — still low enough that carrying a short position is nearly free. Borrow availability has opened up materially as shorts have covered; the 52-week high in borrow utilization was 100% as recently as April 6, but utilization has since eased to 71%, meaning roughly three shares remain available for every ten already lent out. That is a meaningfully looser market than it was five weeks ago. One data point cuts against the bullish read on positioning: the options put/call ratio jumped to 0.092 on Tuesday, more than two standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.077. That is the most defensively skewed the PCR has been in months — investors adding calls are outpacing the norm but some hedgers are also reaching for protection ahead of the next catalyst.
The most important piece of Street news this week came from Truist Securities, which raised its price target to $11 from $9 on May 8 while keeping its Buy rating intact. That moves the consensus mean target to $8.53, implying roughly 59% return potential from current levels — a wide gap relative to a stock that has already doubled over the past month. The bull case centres on ABS-201, Absci's AI-designed biologic targeting the PRLR pathway as a hair-loss treatment. The bear case is familiar in early-stage biotech: the company burns cash, depends on external funding, and its partnerships remain unproven as revenue contributors. The short score of 77.6, which ranks in the 5th percentile of the universe (lower is more shorted), has been drifting down all week from a recent peak of 79.1 — a direction that favours the bull case incrementally.
On the ownership side, ARK Investment Management added 388,000 shares in the month to April 30, lifting its stake to 8.1% of shares outstanding. BlackRock added 750,000 shares over the same period. Both moves are modest relative to the positions but directionally consistent with the short-covering narrative: institutional buyers have been absorbing supply as short sellers exit. Founder and CEO Sean McClain remains the largest named individual holder at 5.7% of shares. The most recent insider activity on record was a 100,000-share purchase by Chief Scientific Officer Andy Busch in mid-March at $2.29 — a price that now looks prescient given the stock closed at $5.36 on Tuesday.
The stock dropped 7.4% on Tuesday alone after a 4.5% decline on the week. That one-day move stands out against a peer group that was mostly softer but not nearly as sharp: SANA fell 8.4% on the day and TNXP gave back 5.9%, while NBIX bucked the sector with a 3.5% gain. The one-month surge of 80% into Tuesday's close explains the vulnerability to retracement; the stock was pricing in a lot of good news. The Q1 results on May 7 produced only a modest negative reaction of around 0.8% the following day, so the sell-off this week appears more positioning-driven than fundamental.
With earnings scheduled for June 4, the next data point that will matter most is whether clinical progress on ABS-201 and any partnership update shift consensus beyond the current $8.53 target cluster — or whether the gap between the stock's recent run and that target closes from below.
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