PURR has spent this week doing what short sellers least wanted: rising 24.6% to close at $7.79, the strongest weekly print in months, with a 12.4% single-day surge on Tuesday alone. The stock is up more than 21% over the past month. Against that backdrop, short sellers have been trimming — but they haven't gone away.
The retreat in short interest is real but modest. Short interest as a percentage of the free float has pulled back from a recent peak of 9.9% on May 12 to 8.3% — a seven-day decline of roughly 6.7%. The broader trend, though, points the other way: back in late April, SI % FF sat near 5%. The doubling of that figure through early May, followed by only a partial unwind, means there is still a meaningful short base riding against a stock that has just put in a strong week. Borrow conditions, meanwhile, tell a story of easing pressure: the cost to borrow has halved since late April, now running at just under 2% annualised, while availability has expanded to nearly 360% of short interest — roughly 35.5 million shares freely available in the lending pool. That is well above the tighter conditions seen in mid-May (availability was closer to 180% on May 12-13) and reflects no immediate squeeze dynamic.
Options traders are broadly constructive. The put/call ratio came in at 0.20 on Tuesday — slightly above its 20-day average of 0.18 but nowhere near the 52-week high of 0.67. The z-score barely clears 0.9, meaning options positioning is not showing meaningful hedging demand despite the short base. Call open interest is running well ahead of puts. That divergence — an elevated short book alongside a call-heavy options market — captures the tension at the heart of this trade: institutional shorts are rebuilding while options participants remain broadly bullish.
The Street agrees with the options crowd. Every analyst covering the stock carries a Buy or Overweight rating. This week, Chardan Capital raised its target from $8.45 to $9.75, the most recent of three consecutive target increases from the firm since December. Cantor Fitzgerald lifted its target to $8.00 from $6.00 earlier in May. Maxim Group initiated at Buy with a $10.00 target in late April. The mean target across the Street now sits at $9.58, roughly 23% above the current price. The bull case centres on Hyperliquid's proprietary derivatives infrastructure: average daily volume has grown from $330 million in December 2023 to $6.4 billion recently, with HIP-3 expected to open a new builder-revenue stream later this year. Bears counter with falling market share — competitors like Aster, Lighter, and edgeX are cutting into Hyperliquid's dominance — and a 58% decline in the native HYPE token from its September peak, which has weighed on the mNAV multiple the stock has historically commanded.
Institutional ownership provides some colour on who holds the conviction. D1 Capital Partners holds 8 million shares (6.5% of the company), unchanged since March. Galaxy Group added roughly 900,000 shares in Q1. More recently, BlackRock and State Street both appear to have initiated positions — both reported first-time holdings as of April 30, adding just over 2 million shares each. That broad-index accumulation alongside specialist crypto holders like Paradigm (4.6%) and Pantera (2.2%) creates a mixed ownership base: passive money arriving just as token-native players hold steady. The short score, meanwhile, has eased to 53.8 from a recent high of 62.8 last Tuesday — still above 50, still pointing to elevated short-side pressure, but a clear week-over-week relaxation as the price ran.
What to watch: whether the short base continues to unwind into strength, or whether the peak-to-now pattern — shorts building through early May as HYPE compressed, then trimming as the stock rallied — reasserts with another leg of accumulation if price momentum stalls.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open PURR 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.
