Ondas Inc. is now a week further down the same road: short interest has broken above 45% of the float, availability remains locked at zero, and the stock has shed another 7% since the last note.
The borrow market is as tight as it has been all year. Availability has held at or near 0% for virtually every session since June 16 — the brief loosening that peaked at 12.7% on June 5 is now firmly in the rear-view mirror. Short interest climbed to 45.6% of the free float as of June 23, up from just under 44% a week ago and up a further 4.3% on the week. That is the highest reading in the current data window, and it continues a slow but unrelenting grind that has been in place since mid-May. The cost to borrow, at 1.60%, edged up about 3% on the week — still low relative to the demand signal the lending pool is sending. With availability at zero, that number reflects price discovery in a market where new shorts simply cannot get filled at scale; it is not the stress indicator here, the availability figure is. The ORTEX short score has crept to 69.9, its highest point in the trailing 10-day window and a tick above where it stood at the June 17 note.
Options positioning has moved modestly more defensive. The put/call ratio is running at 0.49, above its 20-day average of 0.46 and roughly one standard deviation elevated. That is not an extreme reading — the 52-week high is 0.54 — but the directional shift is consistent with the broader tone: incremental caution, not panic. The stock itself closed at $8.53 on June 23, down 4% on the day and off 7.4% on the week. That is more than a 35% decline from the $13.43 level at which CEO Eric Brock sold $31.9 million worth of stock on June 2, just one day after receiving a 4.5 million share award.
The Street remains formally constructive, but the gap between targets and reality is now hard to ignore. Needham reiterated its Buy rating in May with a $23 target, and Northland raised its target to $18 in late March. Against a stock trading at $8.53, those figures imply more than double from current levels. The factor scores tell a different story: the short-score rank sits in the 2nd percentile of the universe, the EPS surprise rank is in the 1st percentile, and the utilization rank is 1st percentile. Earnings momentum over 30 days is deeply negative (5th percentile), though the 90-day figure is more constructive at the 74th percentile — a split that suggests the recent deterioration is more recent than structural. The bull case centres on autonomous solutions and the defense/digital transformation thematic; the bear case points to acquisition dependency, lumpy defense budgets, and persistent cash burn.
The institutional picture offers one small counterpoint to the bear narrative. Van Eck added nearly 2.9 million shares through May, BlackRock added 2 million, and Goldman Sachs built a position of just over 5 million shares in Q1. These are passive and semi-passive flows rather than conviction bets, but the direction is at least not outright liquidation. On the insider side, the picture is less ambiguous: the CEO sale at $13.43 has aged poorly with the stock 36% lower, and multiple directors sold smaller amounts at $9.70 in May.
With earnings scheduled for August 14, the question shaping the next seven weeks is whether the current short base — nearly half the free float, in a pool with no available shares to borrow — holds its nerve into the print, or whether any positive news catalyst forces a disorderly unwind in a market with almost no borrow to absorb new covering demand.
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