Capricor Therapeutics is locked in the same post-earnings bear grip described earlier today — and the data published since that note has only deepened the story, not reversed it.
Short interest has now reached 24.5% of the free float, with 11.2 million shares short as of May 19. That marks an 8% rise on the week and 23% over the past month — a pace that places CAPR firmly among the most heavily shorted small-cap biotechs in the US. The ORTEX short score hit 73.7 on May 19, its highest reading in the past two weeks, and ranks in just the 7th percentile of the broader market. Bears built through the May 12 earnings print — which sent the stock down 4.9% the next day and 15.6% over the following five days — and have not let up since.
The borrow market is the most dynamic part of the setup right now. Availability has tightened from roughly 440% at the start of May to 196% today, as new short demand absorbs lendable supply at an accelerating rate. The 52-week low for availability was essentially zero — meaning the market has seen this stock fully locked before. Cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.56%, which is actually the nuanced counterpoint: bears face almost no carrying cost at current levels. That combination — a heavily built short position, tightening availability, but cheap borrow — is the core tension. If availability compresses further toward the tight end of its historical range, holding a short position becomes more expensive even if the current rate looks benign.
The options market is not sounding a loud alarm. The put/call ratio is 0.43, only modestly above its 20-day average of 0.40 and less than one standard deviation from the mean. For a stock with a 24.5% short interest, options positioning looks notably calm — call flow is not retreating, and there is no sign of a defensive pile-on from derivatives traders. That divergence is worth noting: short sellers are pressing harder, but options traders are not following.
Institutional ownership adds more texture. Suvretta Capital Management added 2.9 million shares in Q1, making it the second-largest holder at 6.6% of shares. Tang Capital built a new 5.9% stake, adding 1.7 million shares. State Street added 1.4 million shares as recently as April. These are material accumulation moves by known active investors — running directly against the short sellers' direction. Point72, by contrast, trimmed its position by over 1 million shares in the same period. The ownership picture is genuinely split: some sophisticated money is adding aggressively at prices above where the stock trades today.
The insider side is more one-directional. The CFO sold 25,000 shares on May 1 at $31.70. The General Counsel sold the same amount on the same day. Both also sold at the end of March. The net insider activity over the past 90 days runs to approximately 222,000 shares sold, totalling roughly $6.8 million in value. These were sales into a stock trading above $30 — the stock has since fallen to $26.92, down 14.6% on the week and 22.4% over the past month. Whether those sales reflected conviction or routine diversification, the timing left sellers ahead of the decline.
The next earnings event is scheduled for August 6. Between now and then, the key variable to watch is whether borrow availability continues compressing toward the tight end of its historical range — the point at which cheap shorts become meaningfully more expensive to carry.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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