First Robinson Financial Corporation enters the final days of April with an unusual divergence: short interest jumped roughly 55% in the past month, yet the cost to borrow those shares has collapsed to a multi-month low.
The borrowing story dominates this week's setup. Cost to borrow has fallen sharply — down 31% over the past week to 2.53%, and off more than 66% from a month ago when it was running above 5%. Compare that to last autumn, when CTB was above 10% through November and into early December 2025, a period when borrow was genuinely constrained. Today's rate is less than a quarter of that peak. Availability is also extraordinarily loose: at 2,838% of short interest, there are nearly 28 shares available to borrow for every one already shorted. That is about as wide-open a lending market as this stock ever sees. The 52-week utilization peak of 100% — hit in late November and early December 2025 — is a distant memory.
Short interest tells a slightly more active story, but context matters here. Estimated shares short rose from roughly 75 to 116 between April 23 and April 24, a jump of about 55% in a single step. In absolute terms, however, that is still only 116 shares — a tiny notional position in a micro-cap community bank with a market cap of around $33 million. At 0.02% of free float, this is not a short-seller thesis. The official FINRA fortnightly figure confirms the same 116-share count, with days-to-cover at just one day. The ORTEX short score is a moderate 28, consistent with the stock ranking in the 73rd percentile for short score within its regional-bank peer group — elevated relative to sector peers, but not flashing extreme signals.
The broader data picture is thin by design for a name this small and thinly traded. Valuation multiples, analyst coverage, and institutional data are all absent or too stale to cite. The last meaningful insider activity on record dates to July 2012, when a cluster of directors and the CEO bought shares at $34 — a data point now 14 years old and well beyond any relevance. Dividend history runs through mid-2022, with four consecutive quarters at $0.31 per share. There has been no dividend announcement since, and the most recent data remains stale by more than three years. The dividend factor score of 17 reflects that gap.
The price data itself carries a caveat worth noting: the most recent close of $65.00 is dated April 8 — now 22 days stale. For an OTC-traded micro-cap with minimal liquidity, that is not unusual, but it does mean the current price snapshot may not reflect any moves since early April. The next earnings event on the calendar is June 12. Prior earnings prints have been quiet — the last four events produced one-day moves ranging from -0.4% to +2.2%, with the five-day reaction modestly negative on two of those occasions. The June print is the clearest near-term event for the stock.
With borrow conditions looser than they have been all year, short interest in absolute terms negligible, and price data lagging by three weeks, the dominant question heading into the June earnings release is whether the recent uptick in short shares represents genuine new conviction or simply the arithmetic of a very small baseline.
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