SoundHound AI closes out the week with a striking contradiction: short sellers are pressing their most aggressive position in months, yet options traders are the most bullish they have been all year.
The short side of the trade is entrenched. Short interest climbed to 41.8% of the free float by June 25 — up 7.3% on the week — adding roughly 10 million net shares over four sessions and erasing the modest covering seen two weeks ago. The ORTEX short score held at 81.0, a level maintained without interruption for two weeks, and the stock ranks in the 2nd percentile on short-positioning intensity across the universe. Days to cover from the latest FINRA fortnightly reading is 5.9, meaning shorts face nearly six trading sessions of average volume to fully unwind. The borrow market is completely shut: availability has been 0% throughout June, with every share in the lending pool already committed. Cost to borrow ticked back up to 11.8% this week — up 12.6% on the week — though it remains less than half the 26% levels seen in mid-May as rates have normalised since then.
Options positioning tells the opposite story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.37, close to its 52-week low of 0.31, and running nearly 1.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.41. That is the most call-heavy options skew of the past year. The shift has been rapid: as recently as mid-June the PCR was running above 0.47. Whatever shorts are betting on, options traders appear to be fading them aggressively.
The stock itself is caught in the middle. SOUN closed at $6.41 on June 26, down 10% on the week and off 21% over the past month, after briefly touching $7.12 a fortnight ago. The stock's peer group fared materially better: FIVN gained nearly 10% on the week and RMNI added 3.8%, while REKR fell 12.9% and PONY lost 17.6%. SOUN sits in the weaker half of its cohort — meaningful given these peers also carry elevated risk profiles.
The Street is cautious but not uniformly negative. The consensus sits at hold, with bulls pointing to the company's diversified voice AI revenue streams, a clean balance sheet with no debt, and an EPS estimate revision cycle that ranks in the 99th percentile on 90-day momentum. Bears counter that the stock's valuation — still pricing in multiples near 30x 2026 revenue at the high end — leaves little room for execution missteps in a competitive market. The most recent formal analyst action, from Northland Capital Markets in early May, lowered the price target to $12 from $14 while keeping an Outperform rating. With analyst data now roughly 50 days stale, the current mean target of $14.25 is well above the $6.41 price but should be read as lagging given the month's sharp decline.
Insider activity adds a further layer of caution. On June 15, five executives — including CEO Keyvan Mohajer and co-founder Seyed Emami — sold shares simultaneously at $7.46. The CEO's sale totalled around $944,000. These look like scheduled programme sales given the low significance scores assigned, but the cluster is notable: every C-suite member with a public filing sold on the same day, at a price meaningfully above where the stock is now.
August 6 is the date to watch — that is when SoundHound next reports earnings, and the history here is not encouraging for bulls. The last two prints produced day-one drops of 2.3% and 5.2% respectively, with the latter extending to a 9% loss over five sessions. With shorts fully loaded, the borrow market sealed, options traders moving hard to the call side, and the CEO himself selling six weeks out from the next release, the setup into that print is as charged as it has been all year.
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