Eightco Holdings heads into its May 14 earnings release in the most compressed lending market of the year — with every share in the borrow pool lent out and short interest at its highest level in months.
Short positioning tells a very aggressive story this week. SI % of free float jumped 35% in seven days to 10.4%, rising from around 7.7% a week ago to a level not seen since early April's spike. The move has been relentless: shorts added positions on every single trading day from April 28 through May 11, roughly doubling the pace of accumulation. Availability has tightened to just 4.1% of short interest — meaning for every 24 shares already borrowed, there is barely one left to borrow — and availability has been near zero for most of this week. That is one of the tightest borrow conditions the stock has seen in the past 12 months.
Cost to borrow tells a more measured story and is the one counterpoint to the squeeze narrative. At 3.6%, the rate is modestly higher week-on-week but has actually fallen more than 21% over the past month, down from a peak above 5.9% in early April. Borrow is tight by share count, but not punishingly expensive by rate — suggesting short sellers built positions when stock was cheaper to borrow and have been reluctant to cover even as availability dried up. The ORTEX short score has climbed steadily from 57 to 61.6 over the past two weeks, now ranking in the 13th percentile for short pressure within its sector. Options traders are not markedly defensive: the put/call ratio is 0.66, slightly above its 20-day average of 0.61 but only 0.8 standard deviations above the mean — well within normal range and a long way from the 52-week high of 1.76.
The ownership picture adds a crucial layer of context. In March, a single investment advisory entity — listed as Worco & Associates — disclosed a position of nearly 87 million new shares, a stake representing roughly 27% of shares outstanding, with a reported cost near $0.89 per share. Payward Inc., the entity behind Kraken, also reported a fresh position of nearly 12 million shares in the same period. These are not passive indexers; both entries look strategic. The institutional backdrop explains why the borrow pool has tightened so rapidly: a large share of the float has moved into concentrated hands, leaving less stock available to lend. The most recent disclosure that emerged Wednesday is particularly significant: Eightco revealed treasury holdings including a $90 million indirect OpenAI stake, $18 million in Beast Industries equity, more than 11,000 ETH, and 283 million Worldcoin tokens — a positioning that makes this look far more like a crypto/AI treasury vehicle than a traditional broadline retailer.
Earnings history shows highly asymmetric moves. The April 15 release produced a 37% single-day jump. The March 31 event added 7% on the day before a five-day pullback. The two prior prints in late 2025 both saw the stock fall on the day and continue lower over the following week, with five-day losses of 23% and 27% respectively. With short interest at its highest of any recent pre-earnings point and the lending pool fully exhausted, the setup is more charged than usual regardless of direction — a significant upside move would face a heavily-shorted float with almost no available stock to borrow against new positions, while a downside move faces limited immediate short-covering friction given the low borrow cost.
What to watch: tomorrow's earnings release is the immediate catalyst, but the treasury disclosure — and whether management quantifies the Worldcoin and ETH position valuations — may matter as much as the headline numbers for how shorts respond in the days following the print.
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