Forward Industries heads into its May 13 earnings report with short sellers retreating and freshly minted analyst coverage adding a bullish tilt — yet the stock has shed 14% in a week and is down 35% year-to-date, making that optimism hard to reconcile with the price action.
The most interesting development this week is the sharp unwind in short positions. Short interest has roughly halved over the past month — down 47.5% — to 1.6% of the free float. That level is modest by any measure. Borrow costs have followed suit, easing to 3.26% from a peak above 5% in early April. Availability has loosened enough to suggest there is no meaningful pressure on the lending pool. The ORTEX short score of 45.4 sits close to mid-range, well off the 49–51 zone it occupied through mid-April. Taken together, the lending market tells a story of shorts exiting rather than piling in — the bears have been trimming, not pressing.
Options positioning has edged more defensive, but only modestly. The put/call ratio is running at 0.20, above its 20-day average of 0.17 and roughly 1.7 standard deviations above that mean. The absolute level is still low, however, and the 52-week high on the PCR sits at 2.13 — so current readings are nowhere near stretched. This is caution at the margin, not a full-on hedging rush.
The Street angle is genuinely new this week. B. Riley initiated coverage on April 23 with a Buy. Zacks followed on April 29 with an upgrade to Hold. Two buy ratings give a consensus price target of $7.75 against a last close of $4.23 — implying 80% upside on the analyst screen. That gap deserves a caveat: FWDI is a micro-cap in transition, and with only two analysts covering it, the target mean is fragile. Still, the initiation from B. Riley is a signal that some institutional eyes are now formally on the name.
Institutional ownership adds texture. Galaxy Group Investments and J Digital 6 Cayman each hold roughly 10.5% of shares, between them controlling over a fifth of the register. Multicoin Capital sold 6.2 million shares in March at $4.44 — a $27.4 million exit — and has since dropped to 2.3% from what was a much larger strategic position. Galaxy Digital also cut its stake sharply, trimming nearly 6 million shares. The CIO, Ryan Navi, did buy a token $70,800 worth of stock in December — but against the scale of institutional selling that surrounded it, the signal is limited.
The earnings calendar adds the final piece. Q2 results are due May 13. The most recent comparable print, on March 3, produced a one-day move of +13.8% and a five-day gain of +13.1% — a sharp positive reaction. The prior event, in February, went the other way: down 1.8% on the day and down 8.1% over five days. Peer performance this week has been similarly mixed: OUST and NEON both dropped around 8% on the week, while CCTG and INVZ managed modest gains. FWDI's 14% weekly drop is on the steeper end of a group that has broadly struggled.
With the CFO appointment (Mark Brazier, confirmed April 15) still fresh, B. Riley newly on the tape, and earnings two weeks out, the key watch will be whether that March earnings momentum — and the analyst thesis — can withstand a print that lands while the stock is trading at a third of last September's level.
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