Applied Digital Corporation dropped 16.6% on the week to $36.62, even as the one-month picture still shows a 16% gain. The week's most interesting tension: shorts haven't flinched at all, options traders turned sharply defensive, and the stock is drifting back toward a mean analyst target that still sits well above the current price.
Short positioning on APLD is genuinely heavy. At 27.8% of the free float — roughly 79.5 million shares — this is among the more aggressively shorted names in the digital infrastructure space, and the level has barely moved all week, edging up less than half a percent. Bears are not covering. The borrow market tells a more nuanced story: the cost to borrow has fallen to around 0.64%, down a third from a month ago, meaning it is cheap to maintain a short here. Availability, however, tightened sharply on Tuesday — dropping to 42.7% from above 100% just the session before. That overnight swing, from freely available borrows to a market where fewer than one share remains available for every two already lent, is worth watching. The 52-week low availability reading is just 0.11%, a reminder of how tight this borrow pool can get when sentiment turns.
Options traders moved defensively in a single session. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.53 on Tuesday — nearly three standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.40, and the highest reading in almost a year outside the 52-week peak of 0.66. The prior nineteen sessions had been almost entirely calm, with the ratio hugging its mean. That one-day spike is a sharp departure. Peers moved in the same direction: fell 8.4% on the week, dropped 7.4%, and shed 5.5%. APLD's 16.6% decline was steeper than all of them, suggesting stock-specific selling pressure added to a broader sector headwind.
The Street remains constructive despite the weakness. Needham lifted its target to $51 on May 15 — within the last five days — keeping a Buy rating. The mean analyst target is $53.10, implying roughly 45% upside from Tuesday's close. Every analyst action in the dataset is a Buy or Outperform; there are no downgrades or holds on record. The bull thesis centres on hyperscaler partnerships, high-performance compute demand, and a growing capacity pipeline in AI and HPC. Bears point to community pushback on new data-centre construction, a highly competitive market creating pricing pressure, and concentration risk around a small number of key customers. Valuation is stretched: EV/EBITDA is running at around 61x, though it has compressed roughly 15% over the past month as the stock pulled back from its highs. The ORTEX short score is 71 — elevated but slightly off its recent peak — and the EPS surprise factor ranks in the 85th percentile, meaning the company has a strong recent track record of beating estimates.
On the institutional side, Goldman Sachs added more than 6.3 million shares through the end of March — the largest single increase among top holders in the period — taking its position to 7.3 million shares or about 2.6% of the company. Vanguard and Hood River Capital Management also added meaningfully. D. E. Shaw trimmed by 4.8 million shares, the largest reduction in the top-holder list. Insider activity has been net positive over 90 days in share-count terms, though that reflects large equity awards to CEO Wesley Cummins and the CFO in early April. Both executives also made open-market sales in April in the low $24–$35 range, well below Tuesday's close.
The next earnings event is scheduled for July 21. The most recent print triggered an initial day-one drop of around 5.5%, followed by a five-day recovery of more than 8%. With availability tightening sharply this week and the put/call ratio at a near-year-high, how that lending pool and options positioning evolve into the summer reporting season is the setup worth tracking.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open APLD 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.
