TeraWulf has added 18% in a week and now trades at $25.18 — yet the short sellers who featured so prominently in last week's note have barely moved.
The core tension is simple: a stock running hard into June 9 earnings, with 24.5% of the free float still sold short and options traders leaning notably bullish. Something has to give at the print.
Short interest tells a story of conviction on both sides. Shorts held near 102.5 million shares through the week — essentially unchanged from seven days ago, a less-than-0.1% decline despite the 18% price move. That's a meaningful contrast: short sellers absorbed the rally without covering. Over the past month, short interest has climbed roughly 13%, meaning the stock has run 26% higher at the same time the short book has been built up. Borrowing costs remain low at 0.58% annualised, and availability has loosened materially this week, climbing to 107% — meaning for every share borrowed, roughly one more sits available. That's well off the 52-week tightest level of under 2%, and the loosening suggests no squeeze mechanics are in play. Shorts can hold, and new shorts can enter cheaply.
Options positioning backs the bulls. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.40, below its 20-day average of 0.43 and sitting closer to the 52-week low of 0.30 than the high of 0.69. That's nearly one standard deviation below the recent mean — traders are buying calls, not hedging downside. The setup is unusual given how large the short book remains: options traders are positioned for continuation while shorts are dug in. One of these groups will be wrong by mid-June.
The Street is firmly in the bull camp. Morgan Stanley's target of $42 remains the high-water mark, set on May 19. The consensus mean of $33.86 implies over 34% upside from the current price — a gap that has narrowed as the stock has re-rated, but still substantial. Every analyst who moved in the past two weeks moved higher: KBW lifted from $25 to $33, Needham from $22 to $28, and Jefferies initiated fresh at $28. The bull case rests on TeraWulf's transition from bitcoin mining toward HPC and AI data center infrastructure, a $250M corporate revolver reducing balance sheet risk, and improving gross margins in Q1. The bear case is execution: this is a company with a negative ROE, negative earnings (PE of -91.7 is a function of losses, not multiple expansion), and a history of Bitcoin price dependency. The EV/EBITDA multiple at 38x reflects genuine growth expectations, but EPS momentum has swung sharply negative over the past month — a detail the analyst upgrades haven't fully addressed.
The insider cluster from May 18 is worth revisiting in light of the move since. CEO Paul Prager, CTO Nazar Khan, CFO Patrick Fleury, and Executive Director Kerri Langlais all sold at $21.14 — a price that now looks like a discount of roughly 19% to where the stock trades today. The sells were accompanied by stock awards of similar or larger size, the standard pattern for executive compensation plans, which limits the read-through. But the net 90-day insider position is actually positive at just over 4.5 million shares, suggesting award grants have outrun the sales in aggregate. Jane Street's addition of 25.7 million shares in recent filings — lifting their stake to 5.6% — is a more directional institutional signal in the near term.
Across the peer group, the rally has been broad. CLSK led on the week at 27.5%, while CIFR added 20.4% and KEEL 22.7%. WULF's 18% compares respectably, if not at the top of the group. The widest read across the sector is that Bitcoin-correlated equities are in a broad risk-on move — WULF's rally is partly the stock, partly the tide.
With earnings on June 9, the next few sessions will clarify whether the short book begins to unwind or digs in further — the EPS surprise percentile ranking in the 96th percentile signals a history of beating estimates, and that's the data point the bulls will be watching most carefully.
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