BULL enters the week with a widening disconnect: short sellers have been covering aggressively while the stock falls anyway, a rare combination that makes the coming quarter's fundamentals test all the more consequential.
The short-interest story here is one of rapid unwinding rather than escalating pressure. Bears have pulled back hard — short interest dropped 17% over the past week to 3.8% of the free float, and is down 26% over the past month. That's a meaningful retreat from the ~21 million shares short in early May to roughly 15.7 million today. Yet the stock is still off 11% on the week and 22% on the month, closing Tuesday at $5.50. Shorts exiting haven't provided the usual relief bid; sellers are elsewhere. The borrow market reinforces the low-tension read: cost to borrow is a negligible 0.43%, well below its six-week range of 0.3%–0.65%, and availability is comfortably loose at 280% — meaning nearly three shares are available to borrow for every one already lent out. The lending pool is not strained in any direction. Options traders aren't adding much heat either: the put/call ratio at 0.17 is almost exactly on its 20-day average of 0.165, a z-score of essentially zero, and well below the 52-week high of 0.58. No hedging surge, no speculative call buying — just quiet.
The Street's read is more bullish than the price action suggests. Rosenblatt has maintained its Buy rating and $12 target through multiple check-ins this year, most recently on June 10 — that target implies more than 118% upside from Tuesday's close. Rosenblatt did trim the target from $15 to $12 in early March, and the $12 level has held since. The bull case rests on the Q3 2025 revenue surge: total revenues rose 55% year-on-year to $156.9 million, with trading revenues up 56% and adjusted operating margins near 23%. The bear case is equally concrete — the stock has lost more than a fifth of its value in a month, crypto trading volumes have crimped Q4 estimates by roughly 30%, and the EPS surprise factor score of just 5 (out of 100) signals the company has been consistently missing expectations. The P/E multiple has compressed by 7.6 points over the past 30 days, now near 25x, as the price falls faster than earnings estimates recover.
The institutional picture adds a note of caution. The largest individual holder, Anquan Wang, trimmed nearly 20 million shares in the quarter ending March 31, reducing his stake to 93.75 million shares — still a dominant 17.3% of the company. Millennium Management added 2.5 million shares in the same period, and AQR and Hudson River Trading each entered as new holders with positions above 3 million shares each, suggesting some fresh institutional interest at lower prices. On the insider side, the President sold 75,000 shares at $6.22 on May 26 — a modest sale in dollar terms ($467K) but notable given it came after the stock had already retreated from its highs.
The most recent earnings print, from late May, is the clearest precedent in the data. The stock fell 11.6% the day after results and an additional 9.4% over the following five days — a sharp double-leg decline that accounts for much of the one-month drawdown visible today. The next scheduled print is August 28.
With the short-score easing from 51 to 47 over the past week and close peers HOOD and COIN also under pressure (down 5% and 11% respectively on the week), the setup heading into summer is less about short positioning and more about whether Webull's trading-volume trends can stabilise enough to arrest the gap between a $5.50 price and a $12 analyst target.
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