Goodfellow Inc. heads into its May 12 Q2 results with a striking contradiction: virtually no one is short the stock, yet the cost to borrow it has jumped sharply over the past month.
The most notable move in the lending market is in the cost of borrow, not the size of the short position. Borrowing costs have climbed to 8.3% annually — up roughly 45% on the week and nearly five times where they sat a month ago. That spike happened even as reported short interest collapsed. Estimated shares short fell from 1,600 in late March to just 29 today, dropping the short interest as a percentage of free float to a negligible 0.0006%. The disconnect — higher borrow costs alongside vanishing short positions — points to an extremely thin lending pool where tiny changes in demand move the rate. Availability is correspondingly tight: the lending pool is around 80% utilised as of April 23, down fractionally from a near-full 95% the day before, and the 52-week peak was 96%. With so few shares available to borrow, the market for GDL's stock is essentially one-sided.
The ORTEX short score reinforces that picture, though not in the way bears would want. The score briefly spiked to around 49 on April 22-23 before snapping back to 27 — a reading that sits firmly in the lower third of the market. That two-day elevation coincided with the availability tightening to its highest levels; once those positions cleared, the score reverted. At 27, the short score signals limited bearish conviction. The ORTEX combined score is similarly modest at 29. For context, Goodfellow ranks in the 87th percentile on short score rank — meaning the short pressure here is higher than most stocks in its universe even at these low absolute levels — but in the 5th percentile for utilisation rank, meaning very few comparable situations have borrow this fully used.
Fundamentally, Goodfellow is navigating a soft patch. Q1 results released April 8 showed sales of CAD 108.7 million, down from CAD 111.2 million a year earlier. The net loss widened to CAD 3.1 million from CAD 2.3 million. That follows a full-year fiscal 2025 result that saw sales recover to CAD 543 million but net income roughly halve year-on-year to CAD 7.1 million, with basic EPS falling to CAD 0.86 from CAD 1.58. Soft Canadian construction demand is the headline factor; industry snapshots from late April continue to flag weak pulp and wood products demand. Recent earnings reactions have been contained — the stock fell just 1.4% after the April 8 print and has moved within a tight 2.4% range either way over the last four quarterly announcements, suggesting the market is broadly calibrated to this cycle.
The ownership picture underlines the illiquid, family-controlled character of the stock. The Goodfellow family and associated holding companies control roughly 41% of shares between them, and the top nine disclosed holders account for the vast majority of the register. FMR LLC added just over 19,000 shares to its 10.2% position in the period to January 2026. Insider activity is dated — the most recent disclosed trade was the CEO, Patrick Goodfellow, buying 2,000 shares at CAD 11.40 in August 2025. At CAD 11.65, the stock is barely above that level a full eight months later. The Chairman, Robert Hall, made multiple small open-market purchases in April and May 2025 at prices between CAD 11.10 and CAD 11.20. Both executives were buying at or near current prices, in a stock that has been effectively flat for a year.
The May 12 print is therefore a test of whether Q1's widening loss was seasonal noise — first quarters are typically the weakest for lumber and building materials distributors in Canada — or the early read on a more prolonged demand trough. The dividend history is stale, with the last declared cash dividend in early 2022, making income a non-driver. What to watch is whether construction-related demand commentary improves alongside any sequential recovery in sales volume, and whether the spike in borrow costs from a thin lending pool persists or resolves as the event approaches.
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