IREN has added another 11% this week — the squeeze that last week's note called "uncomfortable for shorts" has now become genuinely painful.
The prior note, published May 27, caught the stock at $59.78 and flagged 66.2 million shares short with availability as tight as 21.5% just days earlier. The picture has shifted materially since. Short interest has dropped by nearly 23% over the week to 51.4 million shares, now representing 18.1% of free float — still high in absolute terms, but the rate of covering has accelerated sharply. Against a stock that has now risen 46% in a single month to $66.60, short sellers are being forced out. That dynamic is the story this week.
The lending market paints a nuanced picture. Availability has loosened to 48.6% — meaningfully better than the 21.5% seen in mid-May, when the borrow was close to fully consumed. Cost to borrow has eased too, dropping 14% on the week to 0.57%. Those moves suggest covering is happening at scale: as shorts buy back shares, the pressure on the lending pool eases. The 52-week low for availability was 0.28%, meaning the borrow can get far tighter than it is now — but for the moment the squeeze is releasing rather than intensifying. Options positioning adds a cautionary nuance. The put/call ratio has climbed to 0.71, above its 20-day average of 0.65, and sits 1.35 standard deviations elevated. That's not extreme, but it does suggest some investors are hedging into the rally rather than chasing it with pure upside calls.
The Street has turned notably constructive in recent weeks. Multiple analysts raised targets following the May 7 results. Cantor Fitzgerald lifted its target to $99 from $77. Macquarie moved to $90 from $77. B. Riley raised to $88 from $83. And today, Canaccord Genuity lifted to $79 from $70 while maintaining its Buy. Against a current price of $66.60, the consensus target of $80.49 implies roughly 21% further upside. The lone dissenter remains JP Morgan, which kept its Underweight rating even as it raised its target to $46 from $39 — a sign that at least one bellwether house views the rally as overdone. The bull case centres on IREN's pivot from bitcoin mining to AI compute infrastructure, through partnerships with Microsoft and NVIDIA. Bears flag execution risk: converting capacity on time, commissioning GPU clusters, and relying on a handful of large counterparties for revenue are all meaningful variables.
Peer performance this week shows IREN running well ahead of the group on a one-week basis. CIFR added 14.2% and HUT gained 18.2%, while CLSK slipped 6.5% and MARA was flat. KEEL posted the strongest week in the peer group at nearly 20%, but IREN's 11.4% gain on top of a prior week that already saw 25% is the more notable compound move. The stock is now up 46% in a month — a run that peers broadly have not matched, reinforcing the stock-specific short-covering dynamic rather than a pure sector bid.
The ORTEX short score has eased slightly to 66.2 from a peak near 67.7 ten days ago, reflecting the covering wave. At 18.1% of free float, short interest is still elevated enough that further covering could continue to amplify any positive catalyst. The next earnings event is August 28 — until then, the debate between JP Morgan's caution and the bullish consensus's $88–$99 targets is the tension worth watching.
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