Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Bets 2026 Second Half Will Be Best Since 2021

NEW YORK, October 18 —

Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (CLF) logged its biggest single-day stock gain of 2026 after the CEO forecast the strongest second-half performance since 2021.

Why 2021 Is the Ceiling This Guidance Is Reaching For

Post-pandemic supply chain dislocations drove US steel prices to multi-decade highs in 2021, and integrated mills generated exceptional cash that year. When the CLF CEO benchmarks the next two quarters against that peak, the implied EBITDA bar is steep. Cleveland-Cliffs generated $19.2bn in TTM revenue but only $6mn in FCF, a near-zero margin that illustrates how sensitive the business is to pricing spreads. A genuine 2021-level recovery would require a meaningful shift in pricing, volume, or cost per ton, and none of those shifts yet appear in the trailing numbers.

CEO Is Selling Shares Into This Rally

The same CEO who just issued the most bullish guidance call in five years is also a net seller of the stock, per recent insider trading disclosures. Insider selling during a period of forward guidance this positive is not illegal, but it is a data point retail buyers absorbing the headline should weigh separately from the press release. The person with the most complete view of the order book is a seller. That does not make the guidance wrong, but a clean bull narrative it is not.

13.9% Short Interest Makes This a Loaded Trade

Nearly one in every seven CLF shares is sold short. If Q3 results confirm the H2 trajectory, short covering could amplify the move well beyond what an earnings beat alone would justify. The reverse holds equally: a miss at Q3 turns the short base from squeeze fuel into validation. At 12.8x forward P/E against trailing EPS of -$1.61, use the DCF calculator to model what H2 revenue and margin assumptions actually justify today's $12.12 price. The entire gap between price and fundamental value is bridged by the promise of an H2 inflection, and that promise now has a hard deadline.

One Tariff Headline Showed the Vulnerability

On the same day CLF surged, a report that the Trump administration is considering halving import tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum pulled the entire domestic steel complex lower. NUE, STLD, CENX, and CLF all fell on that news, as visible in the chart above. US steelmakers benefit directly from tariff protection, and any dilution of that buffer compresses their pricing advantage relative to imports. The CEO's bullish H2 guidance and the Canadian tariff-cut risk are structurally in tension, and Q3 results will determine which signal the market was right to believe.

Generate a full Cleveland-Cliffs deep-dive at Basis Report's CLF page, where you can pull live fundamentals and build a scenario model against the CEO's H2 guidance.

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