BEAR CEO Keeps Buying as Shorts Evaporate

Big Bear Gold Corp. enters the back half of April with a story that runs against the grain of its weak price tape — the CEO is a persistent buyer while short sellers have been exiting en masse, leaving a very lightly contested stock in a sector where gold itself is performing strongly.

The insider angle here is genuine and consistent. President and CEO Peter Laipnieks bought 494,715 shares in February at C$0.07, adding to a string of open-market purchases stretching back through 2025. His stake now amounts to 3.6% of the company. Each individual transaction is modest in dollar terms — the most recent cluster totalled roughly C$34,600 — but the pattern is clear: the CEO has been buying at every dip across multiple price levels from C$0.07 to C$0.10, and has not sold a single share in the recorded history.

The short story has quietly collapsed. Short interest dropped more than 91% over the past month, falling from roughly 18,600 shares to just 608 as of April 22. That is essentially zero on a float this size. Availability has swung sharply with it — borrow is now wide open, with an availability reading near 9,999% of short interest, meaning there is virtually no short positioning left to cover and ample room in the lending pool. The ORTEX short score sits at 25.5, well below the mid-range, and the cost to borrow has eased to 1.3% from a peak above 13% in late March. The borrowing market is no longer stressed. Importantly, the short score ranked in the 94th percentile for the broader universe just weeks ago when short interest was elevated — that pressure has since unwound.

The price action tells a harder story. Shares have fallen 27% over the past month, closing Tuesday at C$0.20, down 9% on the week and 5% on the day. That decline cuts across the short-interest unwind — so this is not a short-squeeze recovery. The market cap hovers around C$5.2 million, micro-cap territory, and the company's enterprise value stands just above C$7 million. There are no analyst ratings or price targets in the data. On valuations this thin, the numbers carry limited analytical weight by themselves.

Earnings history offers one reassuring data point: a March 2026 event was followed by a 28% next-day gain and a 50% five-day move. That was an outlier, but it signals the stock can move violently on catalysts. The next scheduled event falls in late June. For now, the tape is weak, short interest is near zero, and the CEO is the most visible buyer in the room.

What to watch: whether the share-for-debt settlement completed on April 22 — which converted liabilities into equity at these depressed prices — accelerates any further dilution concern, and how the stock responds as gold sector sentiment evolves into the June event.