H.B. Fuller bounced 6.4% on the week to $60.56, yet bears have been quietly rebuilding positions at the same time — a tug of war that captures everything interesting about this stock right now.
The short side has shifted meaningfully over the past month. Short interest as a percentage of the free float climbed from roughly 4.1% on April 15 to 5.5% by May 26 — a 34% increase in shares short over thirty days. The weekly pace has picked up too, with short interest rising 10.7% in the past seven days alone. That said, the borrow market offers no sign of stress. Cost to borrow has fallen nearly 19% over the week to just 0.39%, and availability — at over 1,000% of short interest — is firmly in loose territory, meaning there are roughly ten times as many shares available to lend as there are shares currently borrowed. Shorts are adding, but they are doing so cheaply and without any queue for stock. Options add an interesting wrinkle: the put/call ratio has dropped sharply to 0.85, nearly 1.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 3.14. That swing from a heavily put-heavy book toward calls is striking. It reflects a market that had been defensively positioned and has now rotated toward upside exposure as the stock recovered.
The Street picture shifted materially this week. JP Morgan's Jeffrey Zekauskas upgraded from Underweight to Neutral on May 27, attaching a $58 target — essentially in line with the current price. That is not a ringing endorsement of upside, but the removal of an explicit sell signal from a bellwether firm still matters. Citi's Patrick Cunningham, who upgraded to Buy back in October 2025, held his $70 target through a March trim cycle, leaving the consensus a mixed picture: two Hold ratings visible in the data alongside a solitary Buy. The valuation profile is undemanding on most metrics, with EV/EBITDA near 8x and PE just over 12x — both reflecting the modest earnings power and margin pressure that has dogged the adhesives business in recent quarters. ORTEX factor scores underline the ambivalence: short score rank sits at only the 20th percentile, and DTC rank at the 10th, meaning the short-side pressure is not extreme by historical standards even as the raw SI number climbs. The dividend score, ranked at the 100th percentile, stands out as the lone bullish absolute signal in the factor profile.
The most tangible insider signal in recent memory is from CEO Celeste Beeks Mastin, who bought 5,170 shares on April 7 at $57.08 — a $295,000 open-market purchase at a price only modestly below where the stock trades today. CEO buys at market after a weak patch carry more information than routine award activity, and the net 90-day insider position of just over 12,000 shares bought points in the same direction. None of the other recent activity — SVP awards and token sells in late January — shifts the picture, but the CEO print is a genuine signal.
Closest peers RPM and PPG both rallied hard on the week, up 6.0% and 5.7% respectively, suggesting FUL's recovery was broadly in line with a sector-wide bid rather than a company-specific re-rating. AVNT was up 5.2%. FUL outperformed slightly, but the gap is not large enough to suggest a stock-specific catalyst beyond the JP Morgan upgrade. On the negative side, AKE dropped 4.4% on the week, a reminder that not all specialty chemicals names caught the same tailwind.
What to watch next: whether short interest continues to build through the $60-level now that the JP Morgan upgrade has effectively reset the floor, and whether the sharp rotation from puts to calls in the options market holds or fades back toward the defensive posture that dominated for most of the past six weeks.
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