Nuvation Bio heads into its May 21 investor event with an intriguing split — one of the most heavily shorted names in pharma is quietly unwinding its short position even as a freshly announced manufacturing deal signals commercial momentum for its lead drug.
Short interest has been elevated for months, but the direction is shifting. SI % of Free Float eased to 21.2% on May 12 from a recent peak near 22% at the start of May — a week-on-week decline of just over 3%. The 30-day picture is more nuanced: shorts built from around 20.5% in early April to that early-May peak before pulling back. With roughly 50.3 million shares short and an official days-to-cover of 13 days per the most recent FINRA filing, the position is large and would take time to unwind. The ORTEX short score is 77.9 — ranking in roughly the 4th percentile for short score among peers, meaning the lending market still views this as a heavily contested name.
The lending dynamics, however, look less alarming than the headline short figure implies. Availability is relatively loose — the 52-week high for lending utilization was 100%, but the current reading is 41%, meaning well under half the borrowable supply has been committed. Borrow costs have been steady near 0.44%, up modestly on the week but down about 4% over the past month — not the kind of spike that signals a squeeze building in the background. Options traders have actually turned more bullish: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.39, more than a standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.43, and sits near the lower end of its 52-week range (low 0.12, high 1.23). Together, the positioning picture looks heavily shorted but not actively tightening — a large but stable overhang.
The Street is overwhelmingly constructive, with seven buy ratings and no sells on record as of early May. Targets span a wide range — RBC Capital reiterated Outperform at $20, Wedbush held at $11, HC Wainwright at $17, and UBS sits on the sidelines at Neutral with a $7 target. With the stock at $4.84, every bullish analyst sees material upside; the bear case hinges on execution risk in the commercial launch rather than any fundamental disbelief in the science. The latest Benzinga bull case points to projected Ibtrozi sales of $814M by 2026 and a $533.7M cash position as the key pillars. Bears counter with first-quarter sales coming in below estimates — a launch that is gaining traction but not yet running. The factor score picture is mixed: the stock ranks in the 92nd percentile for analyst recommendation divergence (a wide spread between the most bullish and most cautious views) and in the 73rd percentile for dividend score, while EPS momentum over both 30-day and 90-day windows is weak, ranking 21st and 4th percentile respectively.
Insider activity adds a layer of caution. Multiple C-suite executives have been selling consistently. In April alone, a Chief Level Officer and the Chief Medical Officer sold a combined ~287,000 shares for roughly $1.3 million in proceeds — the CMO at $5.02, the CLO at prices between $4.52 and $5.01. These follow a cluster of executive sales in late November, when the CSO sold over $2.6 million worth of stock at prices above $7. None of the recent trades were large enough to move the needle on the company's ownership structure, but the direction has been one-way for months with no offsetting purchases on record.
The week's most notable development landed after the close on May 13: Nuvation announced a manufacturing collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific for U.S.-based production of Ibtrozi. That is a direct commercial infrastructure build-out, addressing one of the key execution risks flagged by the bear case. The stock has drifted only modestly — up 1.7% on May 12 — but the catalyst calendar is dense. Q1 results published May 4 beat estimates and the stock jumped 7.6% the following day, holding most of that gain over the subsequent week. The next investor event is scheduled for May 21. That event, combined with any update on first-quarter commercial traction and the Thermo Fisher collaboration, makes the Ibtrozi launch progress the single thread most worth tracking.
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