Sable Offshore Corp. has handed short sellers a decisive win since last week's earnings preview — the stock is down 34% over the past month and off another 16% this week alone, yet the bear camp shows no sign of covering.
The short interest picture has barely shifted despite the move, which is itself a signal. SI holds at 17.5% of the free float — essentially unchanged from the 17.7% flagged before the June 10 print — meaning shorts are not taking profits into the collapse. The borrow market gives them no reason to rush: cost to borrow has eased to 0.81%, down nearly 20% on the week and close to its cheapest level of the past month. Availability has actually loosened, climbing to roughly 101% — meaning shares available to lend are now roughly equal to shares already borrowed, back to the easiest conditions seen since late May. The short score of 74.2 ranks in the 2nd percentile of all stocks, flagging this as one of the more aggressively shorted names in the market. There is no squeeze pressure here, and the lending data suggests new shorts can still enter with little friction.
Options positioning has flipped completely from the call-heavy frenzy that preceded the earnings print. Before June 10, the put/call ratio was nearly three standard deviations below its mean — extreme bullish skew. It has now drifted back toward the low end of its historical range at 0.29, almost two standard deviations the 20-day average of 0.32. That sounds bullish on the surface, but in context it reflects a market where options volume has shifted: calls still dominate, but the 52-week low on PCR is 0.20, so the current reading is close to maximum call-skew territory. With the stock at $9.99, those calls are increasingly out of the money and the setup looks more like residual positioning than fresh conviction.
The Street was already bracing for trouble. The most recent analyst action of note came from Jefferies in late April, when Lloyd Byrne cut his target from $30 to $24 while keeping a Buy rating — a move that looks prescient given the stock has since fallen another 26% from that point. The mean price target across analysts remains at $27, which at current prices implies more than 170% upside; that gap is too wide to read as a credible near-term anchor and likely reflects targets that have not been revised since the stock was trading well above $13. Benchmark downgraded to Hold in early March. BWS Financial has maintained a Sell with a $6 target throughout. Valuation multiples have compressed sharply — the EV/EBITDA multiple has dropped nearly half a point over the past week and is down 0.45 turns in thirty days, while the PE has contracted by more than 1.6x on the week to just under 7x. EPS factor scores tell a conflicting story: the 90-day EPS momentum rank is in the 91st percentile and EPS surprise ranks 92nd, suggesting the fundamental earnings picture has been better than feared even as the stock price has imploded.
The institutional register helps explain why the stock is so closely held even as it falls. James Flores, the Founder and Chairman/CEO, holds 7.6% directly. Pilgrim Global Advisors holds another 11.8% and appears to be a long-term, concentrated position with no reported change last quarter. Continental General Insurance entered aggressively, adding over 13 million shares in Q1. BlackRock added 2.6 million shares and Morgan Stanley added 2 million. Two Seas Capital built a new position of 3.8 million shares. The concentration of ownership in a relatively small number of holders — with some of the largest holding steady or adding — limits the natural supply of stock for shorts to borrow, even as availability metrics look comfortable at the aggregate level. The CFO, President, and CEO all sold small tranches in late April at $13.56, but those were paired with equity award grants and represent routine plan-based sales rather than a directional signal.
The June 10 earnings release produced only a 0.9% negative reaction on the day — a remarkably muted move given the stock's prior volatility — but the slide has continued since, suggesting the market is repricing something structural rather than reacting to a single data point. The next catalyst is the August 12 earnings date. Between now and then, the tension worth tracking is whether short interest — essentially flat for six weeks above 17% of float — finally starts to decline as shorts lock in gains, or whether the concentration of long holders and ongoing commodity price pressure keeps the standoff intact.
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