Charles & Colvard, the moissanite jewellery maker trading on the OTC Pink market, is a stock defined more by its precarious standing than by any active short interest story — a sub-penny name with a market cap of roughly $48,000 and a price data that is 15 days stale.
The headline number this week is the price itself. The last recorded close was $0.01065, logged on April 15. That single reading reflects a 109% jump on the day and a matching 109% gain over one month — but the price has not updated since. For a stock trading below two cents, this kind of staleness is normal on the OTC Pink sheets, and the gap means any intraday activity since mid-April is invisible to data systems. Readers should treat the price as indicative at best.
Short interest here tells a quiet story. Only about 16,264 shares are estimated short — a figure so small it cannot be expressed as a meaningful percentage of the free float. The month-on-month change of 415% sounds dramatic; in absolute terms it represents fewer than 13,000 additional shares borrowed. Borrow costs run at 6.3%, roughly in line with where they have traded for most of the past six months. Availability is effectively unlimited — at over 2,400% of short interest, there are vastly more shares available to lend than there are shorts in the market. Nothing in the lending data points to any pressure on either side.
The ORTEX short score sits at 29.2, a low reading that ranks in the 75th percentile for its sector — meaning short sellers are less interested in this name than they are in most of its peers. That score has been almost perfectly flat for two weeks, moving only fractionally between 29.2 and 29.3 since April 16, following a brief spike to 34.1 on April 15 that coincided with the last available price print. The lending market's availability of borrow has been correspondingly loose throughout, with utilisation running below 4% for most of April after a brief cluster of elevated readings around March 31 and April 13 that pushed as high as 38.8%.
The ownership picture is thin and concentrated. Nine institutional or named holders account for the reported register, with Ethara Capital LLC holding just over 30% of shares. None of the top holders reported a change in their position in the most recent filings, and the most recent insider data — a cluster of small open-market purchases by the CEO and independent directors in early 2024 at prices between $0.33 and $0.41 — predates the stock's decline to sub-penny levels by more than two years. That data is too stale to carry current analytical weight. Analyst coverage is absent, options do not trade on this name, and valuation multiples beyond enterprise value are not available.
The most relevant context for this week is the earnings history. The January 2026 report triggered a 146% one-day move and a 344% five-day move; the November 2025 print went the other way, losing 69% on the day and 71% over five days. With no confirmed next earnings date in the system, the stock sits without an obvious near-term catalyst — leaving price discovery, such as it is, entirely to OTC market mechanics and whatever trading does or does not occur on days when the tape updates.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open CTHR.Q 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.
