2025: Shorts ditched uranium and piled into lunch

The Year's Biggest Stories

The risers tell you where fresh conviction arrived. PolyNovo (PNV) was the year’s cleanest ‘multiple vs expectations’ short: 1.49% to 11.57% (+10.08%). That’s not a hedge; that’s funds deciding the growth runway was priced too perfectly for too long. GYG was the other big one: 4.10% to 13.85% (+9.75%). A fast-casual growth story with high expectations is exactly where shorts show up when the market starts caring about input costs, wage pressure and the risk of same-store sales wobbling. IPH went from ignored to targeted: 0.83% to 9.03% (+8.20%). The timing lines up with event risk — CEO transition (see “Andrew Blattman to retire as Chief Executive Officer of IPH”) and FY25 results — and a broader 2025 theme where ‘steady compounders’ stopped getting a free pass. Then there’s the consumer travel angle: Flight Centre (FLT) climbed 4.68% to 10.27% (+5.59%). Even with corporate travel resilience and bolt-ons like Iglu Cruise, shorts kept leaning on the cyclicality and the sensitivity to any wobble in discretionary demand. Domino’s (DMP) was the year-end headline: 12.39% to 17.85% (+5.46%), including that October pile-on (+4.92% in a month to 16.86%). This is what happens when a global roll-out story meets a market that’s less forgiving on margins. On the other side, the fallers show where the pain trade flipped. Syrah (SYR) was the biggest unwind: 12.82% to 2.19% (-10.63%). Whatever the original bear case was, the position got too crowded for the liquidity and too hard to hold. Megaport (MP1) collapsing from 10.13% to 1.74% (-8.39%) reads like shorts taking profit as the company kept executing and the easy valuation argument stopped paying. Cettire (CTT) (7.14% to 1.00%, -6.14%) and The Star (SGR) (7.15% to 1.70%, -5.45%) are a reminder that headline-driven shorts can be great trades — until they’re not. SGR, in particular, started the year with a January hit (6.84% to 11.03%, +4.20%) that screamed ‘binary risk’, but by year-end the position had been largely cleared. Finally, uranium itself was a two-act play. PDN finished still heavily shorted at 12.91% (despite being down -2.67% YoY), and DYL ended at 8.35% (-2.29% YoY). But the year’s turning point was September: PDN was aggressively covered from 17.82% to 12.13% (-5.69%). That was the moment the market stopped treating uranium as a one-way crowded short and started managing the risk of a squeeze.

Sector Trends

2025’s sector story is simple: resources dominated early, then consumer and healthcare took over. Resources (uranium, lithium, mineral sands) owned Q1–Q2. BOE/PDN/DYL were permanent fixtures, while PLS/MIN/LTR kept lithium crowded. This was the market expressing scepticism about ramp-ups, capex, timelines and commodity price assumptions — the ‘story-to-execution’ gap. By Q3, the pressure broadened. Education (IEL at 12.79% in Q3; 12.69% in Q4) became a core short. That fits a year where policy and student mobility uncertainty never fully cleared, and the market kept a hair-trigger on guidance. Healthcare growth and medtech became a late-year hunting ground: PNV (11.57%), NAN (9.32%) and CUV (9.46%) all sat in the year-end top 10, with NAN up +5.02% YoY and CUV up +2.75%. These aren’t broken businesses — they’re the kind of quality names that get shorted when valuations are rich and the market wants protection against any stumble. Consumer services was the real Q4 takeover. DMP (17.85%), GYG (13.85%) and FLT (10.27%) sitting together tells you shorts were making a rates-and-cost-of-living call through operating leverage and margin sensitivity. Whether the RBA moved or not, the market traded as if the consumer was capped and cost inflation was sticky. And one more late-year tell: software finally got a tap on the shoulder. WiseTech (WTC) rose from 0.98% to 4.63% (+3.65%) — not top-10 territory, but meaningful for a $16.8b name. That’s the market saying even high-quality global compounders aren’t immune when expectations are high and any growth deceleration becomes tradable.