Nakamoto Inc. heads into the week after a significant earnings miss with short sellers accelerating their builds — a combination that frames the stock's 10% weekly drop in stark terms.
Short interest climbed sharply, rising 15.9% in a week to reach 5.2% of the free float. That is a 30% jump over the past month. The acceleration is notable: shorts added more shares in the final two sessions of the week than in the entire preceding fortnight. On May 13, the company reported Q2 EPS of -$0.38 against a consensus estimate of roughly breakeven, and sales of $2.7M missed the $13.6M estimate by a wide margin. The print arrived just as positioning was already tilting more bearish.
The lending picture tells a more nuanced story. Availability — the ratio of shares still available to borrow relative to what is already out on loan — lurched wildly through the week, touching just 20% in late April and early May when the borrow pool was nearly exhausted. By May 12 it had loosened back to 79.6%, after spiking above 100% on May 8 and May 11 when new supply was evidently released. Cost to borrow came down slightly over the week to 1.55%, though it remains roughly 11% above the month-ago level. The volatility in availability — going from sub-25% (near-empty pool) to above 100% (ample supply) within days — reflects a lending market that is actively being tested rather than one in steady equilibrium.
Options lean heavily toward calls despite the bearish price action. The put/call ratio is running at 0.06, barely above its 20-day average of 0.049 and only 1.6 standard deviations above it. With a 52-week PCR high of 2.6, the current level is still historically tame — options traders have not been rushing to hedge, even as the stock dropped 10% on the week and 20% over the past month. The RSI-14 sits at 37, approaching oversold territory but not yet at an extreme reading.
Analyst consensus remains a Buy, but targets have been ratcheted down steadily. TD Cowen initiated coverage in early April with a $1.00 target. Maxim Group, the other covered name, maintained Buy but cut its target from $1.50 to $0.75 around the same time. With the stock now at $0.18, both targets imply substantial return potential on paper — but the direction of analyst revisions has been consistently downward since coverage began, and the Q2 miss is likely to prompt further reassessments. The EV/EBITDA multiple has declined around 10.8x over the past 30 days, reflecting the compression from falling price and persistent losses.
Ownership is concentrated at the top. David Forrest Bailey and Calli Bailey together hold roughly 33% of shares, reported as of February. Alyeska Investment Group added 18.2 million shares in the most recently disclosed period to reach 3.7% of shares. The ORTEX short score climbed to 60.7 on May 12, up from 56.5 a week earlier — its highest reading in the tracked history and consistent with a stock where the combination of high days-to-cover (9.2), rising short interest, and a freshly negative earnings surprise is catching the market's attention.
The next earnings event is scheduled for May 20. With the Q2 miss already on the tape and short interest still building, the borrow market's behaviour around that date — and whether availability tightens back toward the sub-25% levels seen in late April — is the clearest thing to watch.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open NAKA on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
