Rocket Lab has fallen 16% over the past month to $104.63, and the tension this week is straightforward: shorts are adding exposure into the decline while options traders are doing the opposite.
The short interest rebuild is the clearest shift from last week's note — and it has continued. SI has risen 7.3% on the week to 6.1% of free float, the highest reading in this data window. That's now two consecutive weeks of rebuilding after a covering trend that ran from early May through late May. Shorts added around 2 million shares in the past week alone. The lending market offers no mechanical friction to that rebuild: availability runs at roughly 965%, meaning nearly ten shares are available to borrow for every one currently shorted, and cost to borrow is a negligible 0.38%. Shorts can add freely. The direction-of-travel has definitively flipped from covering to accumulation.
Options tell a sharply different story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.69 — more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.77 — and is close to the lowest reading of the past year. That's a near-record call skew for this name, meaning options traders are leaning bullish even as price falls and shorts rebuild. The two signals don't reconcile easily. Either options traders are buying the dip aggressively and shorts are wrong about the direction, or call buying is hedging-related and the bearish signal from SI is the more informative one. The divergence is the story.
The sector context matters here. Closest peer LUNR fell another 9.3% Tuesday and is down 15% on the week. RDW lost 9% Tuesday. FLY dropped 7.2%. Rocket Lab's 4.2% single-day decline looks relatively contained against that backdrop. The sector rout that defined the week of June 9 has continued into this week, and Rocket Lab is again holding up better than most correlated names — though that hasn't stopped shorts from adding.
The insider picture adds a separate layer of caution. Director Alexander Slusky sold 40,000 shares on June 2 at $123.60, a $4.9 million transaction — and had sold another 60,000 shares across two tranches on May 28 near $149-$150, collecting roughly $9 million. COO Frank Klein and General Counsel Arjun Kampani also sold in late May at prices 30-40% above the current level. None of these look like panic — they were executed near the recent high — but the collective selling by multiple insiders just ahead of a 16% decline is worth noting, particularly as the stock continues to lose ground.
Valuation is stretched even after the pullback. The EV/EBITDA multiple sits at 1,784x, down sharply from over 5,350x a month ago as the stock has re-rated lower, but still reflecting a price-to-perfection dynamic for a company still generating negative earnings. The EPS surprise factor score of 92 confirms Rocket Lab has consistently beaten estimates, and forward EPS growth ranks in the 66th percentile — the fundamental story hasn't broken. But the ORTEX short score has ticked up to 40.5 from 37.9 a week ago, the highest reading in the past ten sessions, reflecting the rebuilding short position.
Next earnings are scheduled for August 6. That print becomes the first real test of whether the current short rebuild is vindicated or squeezed back out — the previous two results produced 1-day moves of -1.5% and +11.5%, followed by 5-day moves of +18% and +24% respectively, which means the post-earnings drift has been the more consequential trade window to watch.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open RKLB on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
