WeRide Inc. enters the final stretch of June with the short rebuild from last week's note showing its first signs of stabilisation — but options traders have just sent the loudest caution signal of the past month.
The options angle is the standout this week. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.30 on Tuesday, nearly 2.7 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.27 — the most defensive reading in recent history and well outside normal drift for a name that typically runs call-heavy. The PCR has only breached 0.30 twice in the past year, with the 52-week high sitting at 0.64. The absolute level is modest, but the z-score of 2.73 tells you the shift in sentiment is unusually sharp relative to recent behaviour. Options traders are hedging more aggressively, and they did it in a single session.
Short interest, by contrast, tells a slightly more mixed story. Bears added positions through most of last week, pushing SI up 7.7% on a weekly basis to 3.7% of free float — roughly 12.75 million shares. That confirms the pattern described in last week's note, where the previous short covering had fully reversed. But Tuesday brought a 4% single-day decline in shares short, the first meaningful pull-back in a week of otherwise persistent building. The ORTEX short score has eased marginally from its 59.98 peak on Sunday to 58.8 — still elevated but no longer climbing. Cost to borrow has risen 21% over the past week to just under 1%, and availability sits at 48.8% — tight, with roughly one share available for every two already on loan, though well above the 19% reading registered as recently as Sunday. The lending market is tight without being extreme, and the cost has not yet repriced enough to meaningfully deter new shorts.
The Street remains constructive on paper, though the analyst data carries a substantial staleness caveat. All coverage was initiated between late 2024 and March 2026, with the most recent initiation — HSBC's Buy at $11.40 — arriving in March. The mean consensus price target of $96.69 is almost certainly a data artefact and should be disregarded entirely; individual initiation targets of $11–$23 are the operative reference points for a stock trading at $6.30. With those targets in mind, every analyst who has covered WRD at initiation has rated it Buy or equivalent, yet the stock trades at roughly half even the lowest published target. The price-to-book multiple of 2.6x has compressed by 0.34 points over 30 days, consistent with a market that is rerating the story lower despite no change in analyst consensus direction. The 90-day EPS momentum factor ranks in the 97th percentile — a genuine bright spot — but 30-day EPS momentum ranks only in the 18th, suggesting the near-term earnings trajectory is still cloudy.
The ownership structure adds context to why the stock is sensitive to sentiment shifts. Uber Technologies became a notable holder in Q1 2026, acquiring 18.75 million shares — a strategic stake that validates the robotaxi commercialisation angle flagged in WeRide's recent partnership announcement. Morgan Stanley's asset management arm added nearly 8.9 million shares in the same period. These are material votes of confidence from sophisticated holders. Against that, the 90-day insider record shows a 5% shareholder buying 4.74 million shares at $2.49 back in March — those shares are now 153% in the money, which could become a supply overhang consideration as the stock pulls back toward the lower $6 range.
With next earnings pencilled in for July 27 and the stock down 11.8% over the past month to $6.30, the most important watch-point is whether the options caution signal proves a one-day anomaly or the start of a sustained defensive tilt heading into the Q2 print — and whether availability, currently recovering from Sunday's 19% trough, tightens back toward that level as the earnings date approaches.
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