Short sellers are piling into IREN at the fastest pace in months. That's happening as Wall Street analysts raise price targets sharply higher — a rare, pointed standoff between two camps with very different views on the stock.
Short interest hit 22.9% of free float as of May 19. That's up 12.2% in one week and 22.6% over the past month. The position is building fast and consistently — shares short climbed from around 47M in early April to over 65M today.
Availability in the lending market tightened sharply mid-week. It hit 21.5% on May 14 — fewer than one share available for every four already borrowed — before easing back to 57.9% by May 18. That's still in tight territory. The ORTEX short score sits at 67.3, with a short-score percentile rank of 7, meaning IREN is among the most heavily shorted names in its peer universe.
The stock fell 8.5% over the past week and 4.7% on Monday alone. Peers moved lower too — RIOT dropped 8.5% on the week, HUT fell 5.9%, slid 5.7% — so sector pressure is real. But IREN's short buildup goes well beyond what sector weakness alone would explain.
Four analysts raised price targets in the past two weeks. All maintained bullish or neutral ratings. Macquarie's Paul Golding lifted his target to $90 from $77, keeping an Outperform rating. HC Wainwright raised its Buy target to $85. BTIG went to $80. The mean analyst price target stands at $75 — implying nearly 49% upside from Monday's close of $50.46.
JP Morgan also raised its target — to $46 from $39 — but maintained an Underweight rating. That's the lone dissenting voice among recent movers, and the one closest to where the stock is actually trading.
The bull case rests on IREN's AI Cloud Services growth, a new 1.6GW data center campus in Oklahoma, and $2.3B in annualized revenue already under contract. Bears focus on execution risk at the Sweetwater site and ongoing exposure to Bitcoin pricing.
The put/call ratio is 0.614, slightly below its 20-day mean of 0.619. Options positioning leans call-heavy — consistent with the analyst community's constructive view. Earlier this week the PCR hit a 2-sigma high of 0.686, the most call-skewed reading in months, before normalizing.
The combination of call-heavy options, bullish analyst upgrades, and a stock down 8.5% on the week points to a market where longs are not yet capitulating — even as short sellers continue to press.
Data summary
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