Chanson International Holding enters this week as one of the most extraordinary short-squeeze setups on Nasdaq — a micro-cap bakery operator whose stock has collapsed 99% in a month while short sellers scramble to cover.
The backstory is a brutal reverse split. On May 7, the company executed a 1-for-100 reverse split, collapsing the share count dramatically. The stock closed at $1.35 on May 12, down 38% on the week and down 99% over the past month — though the month-on-month comparison is mechanically distorted by the split itself. The day-1 reaction to the April 20 full-year earnings print was modest (down 3%), but the five-day move that followed was extraordinary: the stock fell nearly 98%. Annual EPS came in at $0.03, down from $3.68 a year earlier. Revenue was essentially flat at $18.3 million. That EPS collapse, combined with the reverse split, is the catalyst that drove everything else this week.
The short positioning data tells a wild story. Short interest hit 27.3% of the free float on May 12 — but that reading masks what happened in between. In early May, estimated short interest briefly touched 216% of float as shorts piled in at extraordinary scale; ORTEX flagged the move in real time on May 5, noting a 1,016% one-week surge. The month-on-month change in short shares is still up 152% even after the sharp pullback. Importantly, the week-on-week change is now down 87%, meaning many of those shorts have already been covered or the float denominator has normalised post-split. Availability at just 7.4% of short interest is extremely tight — fewer than one share remains available to borrow for every thirteen already lent out. That degree of tightness can make any further short position difficult to establish or maintain.
The cost to borrow has been erratic in a way that reflects the chaos. It spiked to 363% annualised on May 8 — more than nine times its May 6 level — before pulling back sharply to 39.6% on May 12, still a fourfold jump on the week. The extreme intraday cost last Thursday reflects just how difficult it was to source borrows at the height of the short pressure. The ORTEX short score of 76.3 (out of 100) remains elevated, though it has eased from a week-high near 77.5 on May 11. Days to cover sits at the 93rd percentile rank — another sign that unwinding any remaining short position would take time relative to normal trading volume.
There is no meaningful institutional analyst coverage on this stock, and no sell-side price targets to cite. The institutional holder list is thinly populated. The company's market cap is now approximately $525,000 — not $525 million, but half a million dollars. At that scale, conventional valuation frameworks do not apply, and the stock is trading almost entirely on technical and short-positioning dynamics.
The next scheduled event is a fiscal report due June 5. With the borrow market still very tight, short interest still elevated at more than a quarter of the float, and the stock down 99% from its pre-split level, the setup heading into that date is less about fundamentals and more about whether the remaining short base can exit without further squeezing the thin float.
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