Boss Energy’s ambitious uranium plans have seemingly gone into meltdown.

A $4.60+ share price has collapsed to around $1.70, slashing more than $600 million from its market value in mere days. But as longtime uranium hopers count their mounting losses, another group is cashing in.

What happened to plunge the Boss Energy price?

Boss Energy recently delivered its FY26 guidance, including an update on the so-called Honeymoon Uranium Operation. Both sent shockwaves across the ASX.

Despite beating its FY25 production guidance, the FY26 outlook revealed serious ramp‑up headwinds.

Boss warned in the update that the Honeymoon had gone sour in a big way. "Mineralisation continuity and leachability" at Honeymoon are worse than expected, the CEO announced. That threatens the feasibility of Honeymoon’s output capacity by about a million pounds per year. And then there was the news of increased costs to produce that lower yield.

A staggering 44% drop in share price ensued on the day the news broke, with BOE shares briefly trading near $1.90 — a move that erased roughly $620 million in market capitalisation.

CEO Duncan Craib’s resignation announcement around the same time added to investor anxiety (although he'll still be on the Board of Boss).

Taking it in the shorts

The irony of this meltdown is that many negative nancies jeering from the sidelines got it right.

Boss Energy had been one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the ASX. If you're unsure what a "short" really is, it's when an investor borrows shares and sells them, hoping the price will fall so they can buy them back later at a lower cost and pocket the difference. It’s essentially a bet against a company’s share price.

And like clockwork, Boss Energy is up there as one of the most shorted on the ASX every single week according to the regulator who monitors and publishes the data.

Almost 19.5% of its shares were on loan in the prior week. That's huge. Short interest quickly fell to around 13.0% after the plunge, indicating profit-taking and a wave of position closures as the stock bottomed.

When almost one‑fifth of a company’s share register is shorted, and the price collapses on operational alarm bells, those shorts collect the rewards. Many realigned their books just in time.

How much did they make?

While exact profits are impossible to pin down without access to trade-level data, we can estimate the scale of gains based on public short interest figures.

In the week prior to Boss Energy’s collapse, roughly 19.5% of its total shares on issue were reported as being shorted—equivalent to about 74.7 million shares, given its ~383 million share float. After the share price plunged from around $4.65 to $1.70, short interest dropped to 13.0%, indicating that roughly 25 million shares were covered as the price bottomed.

If we assume those short sellers opened their positions near $4.65 and closed around $1.70, that’s a profit of $2.95 per share—or around $73.75 million in total profit during that week alone.

That’s a conservative estimate. If some positions were opened at even higher levels (Boss peaked above $5.00 in June) or closed lower during the sharpest part of the selloff, profits could be higher still. Either way, the numbers point to one of the most lucrative weeks for short sellers on the ASX this year.

Boss didn’t just deliver a bad quarter. It delivered a textbook case study in how aggressive short positioning—when correctly timed—can result in staggering returns.