Core Scientific enters June with shorts firmly on the back foot — a 43% one-month surge to $29.05 has forced the conversation away from bear fundamentals and squarely onto whether the Street's targets can keep pace.
The most striking feature of this week's setup is the disconnect between a still-hefty short position and an options market that has turned meaningfully bullish. Short interest remains elevated at 20.6% of the free float — roughly 64 million shares — and has edged up about 8% over the past month as the stock climbed. Bears have been adding, not covering. Yet the borrow market tells a different story about conviction: cost to borrow is a negligible 0.49% annualised, and availability has actually loosened over the past week to 367%, up from around 288% in early May. With that much capacity still in the lending pool, there is no mechanical squeeze pressure forcing covers. The ORTEX short score has eased to 62 from the mid-60s range seen in late April, consistent with a position that is large but not escalating in urgency.
Options traders, however, have turned notably bullish relative to recent norms. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.48 — about one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.50 — and it's been falling steadily since early May when it sat above 0.53. That drift toward calls suggests the options market is positioned for further upside rather than bracing for a reversal. The 52-week range on PCR runs from 0.24 to 0.63, so the current reading lands in the more constructive half of that band, without yet reaching the euphoric extreme.
The analyst community has been chasing the stock with conviction. Every recent move has been a target raise — no cuts, no downgrades. Jefferies lifted its target from $24 to $37 on May 14. B. Riley followed on May 27, raising from $30 to $33. BTIG moved from $23 to $33 in mid-May. Macquarie was already at $35 after its post-earnings bump in early May. The consensus buy rating is unanimous across 12 covering analysts, with a mean target of $32.05 — now only about 10% above the current price after the stock's run. That gap has narrowed sharply. A stock that was trading at a 40-50% discount to consensus targets just weeks ago is now nearly through them, which changes the risk/reward calculus without any analyst having yet downgraded. The bull case centres on the CoreWeave contract execution and a growing HPC colocation pipeline; the bear case flags dependence on self-mining revenue and uncertainty over hyperscaler lease timing.
Institutional ownership adds an interesting layer. Vanguard's two entities added a combined ~32 million new shares as of March 31 — a significant build. UBS Asset Management added 5.7 million shares in the same period, bringing its stake to over 8% of the company. Clearline Capital added 3.4 million shares. On the other side, Two Seas Capital trimmed by 2.9 million and Citadel by 4.7 million. The net picture is one of active rebalancing rather than wholesale exit — larger passive and institutional names building while some hedge funds lighten. The CLO Todd DuChene has been a consistent seller through April and May, offloading around 60,000 shares in weekly tranches at prices from $19.75 to $26.25. CEO Adam Sullivan sold 87,355 shares at $19.08 in mid-April. The insider sales look more like programmatic plan execution than a directional signal, but the cadence — every week, at every price level — is worth noting as the stock now trades $10 above those April prints.
Earnings history adds modest context. The May Q1 print produced a 4.6% next-day gain. The prior quarter's result in early May produced a 6.9% drop the following session before recovering over the week. With the next scheduled event on August 6, the stock has two full months of trading before that catalyst lands, leaving the AI/HPC contract pipeline as the primary narrative driver in the interim.
What to watch: the analyst mean target of $32.05 is now within easy reach, and whether firms that have raised targets once since earnings move again — or whether the first price-target catch-up trades give way to a more cautious tone — will define how much institutional support the current level attracts.
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