LNKS has dropped 38% in a month and now trades at $1.35 — yet the cost to borrow a share is running at 200%. That combination tells a compressed story about a small stock with an unusually active lending market.
The borrow dynamic is the defining feature here. At 200% annualised cost to borrow, shorts are paying a steep premium to hold positions — a rate that has been broadly range-bound between 150% and 280% since late March. That level signals intense demand for borrows on a very thin float. Borrow availability is moderate at 183% of estimated short interest, meaning there is roughly 1.8 shares available for every share already borrowed — not a squeeze-level squeeze, but tight enough that the rate is unlikely to fall without a material shift in positioning. For context, availability has held within a similar band through most of April and May; there has been no sudden loosening.
Short interest itself has normalised sharply. SI peaked at over 34% of the free float on April 2-3 — an extreme reading for a stock this size — before collapsing to around 1.6% by mid-April and remaining there through this week. The current 1.65% level is a fraction of the April spike, and day-to-day fluctuations in absolute shares short have been relatively small. What stands out now is not crowded positioning but a high borrow cost persisting long after the short interest spike unwound. That combination — low SI, high CTB — typically reflects either residual structural demand from a small group of holders, or thin liquidity in the lending pool keeping rates elevated even as actual short positions contract.
The price action is harder to explain away. The stock has fallen 16% this week alone to $1.35, extending a one-month decline that has erased more than a third of market value. The most recent confirmed earnings event, on April 29, was met with a 6% one-day drop. The prior release in October 2025 saw a 5% fall on the day — though the stock recovered, gaining 44% over the following five days. That split reaction history (bad day, mixed aftermath) gives no clean read on how the market processes results, but the pattern of post-earnings volatility is consistent.
The ORTEX short score of 57.7 is a middle-of-range reading — not a signal of extreme bearish conviction, but a meaningful step above the 44 level recorded on May 4. The score has moved between 44 and 59 over the past ten days, which reflects the oscillating short activity seen in the raw shares data rather than a clear directional trend. The days-to-cover rank of 84 stands out as the highest factor score on the card, suggesting the stock would take relatively long to cover given trading volumes — an important consideration on a micro-cap with limited daily liquidity. The utilisation rank of 16, by contrast, confirms that availability is not critically tight in the broader context.
What to watch next: whether the borrow cost begins to compress back toward the 100-150% range as the stock stabilises near $1.35, or whether further price weakness re-ignites short interest toward the elevated levels seen briefly in April. The next earnings event is scheduled for October 9.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open LNKS 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.
