Rocket Lab ended last week with a 16% single-day surge to $98.01, yet the short position has kept growing — a split-screen moment that defines the current setup heading into August earnings.
The short rebuild that has been running since late May has not relented. Short interest now stands at 7.5% of free float, up 24% on the week and 38% over the past month, with the total position near 40.3 million shares. That is a continuation of the acceleration flagged in the June 24 note, which already called it the fastest weekly build in the data window. The story has since moved further in the same direction: bears are adding even as the stock has bounced hard. The borrow market is tightening in parallel. Availability has dropped from around 620% a week ago to 506% — still comfortable in absolute terms, but the trajectory is consistent and now represents a fall of more than 1,200 percentage points since mid-June when the lending pool was essentially wide open above 1,700%. Cost to borrow has edged up another 14% on the week to just under 0.50%, doubling since late May. The ORTEX short score has climbed from 40.3 to 46.9 over the past ten sessions, the sharpest ten-day move in the series — a signal that the overall short setup is becoming more charged, even if the absolute level remains moderate.
Options tell a quieter story. The put/call ratio is running at 0.73, fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.74, with a z-score near zero. Options traders are neither particularly bearish nor bullish relative to recent norms — a notable contrast to the short side, where conviction is clearly building. The PCR peaked near 0.84 in late May and has drifted lower since, suggesting that while shareholders may have been hedging into the sell-off, that defensive positioning has not intensified further. The valuation picture remains stretched: EV/EBITDA is still above 1,270x and price-to-book is nearly 29x, though both have compressed sharply over the past month as the stock fell from its highs above $140. The EPS momentum and surprise factor scores are unusually strong — both in the top 8% of the universe — pointing to consistent fundamental execution even as the multiple contracts.
Insider activity adds a complicating overlay. The net 90-day insider position in dollar terms is sharply negative, with the general counsel and a director between them selling more than $20 million of stock at prices well above current levels — Kampani sold at $108 in June and $147-150 in late May, while Slusky sold two separate $5-6 million tranches in May and June. Founder and CEO Peter Beck, however, added 5 million shares in late May, a purchase last reported at $5.5 million in value. That divergence — the CEO buying while the legal and board level sell — is the kind of insider tension that rarely resolves cleanly before the next earnings print.
Earnings are scheduled for August 6. The last three prints produced first-day moves of -1.5%, +11.5%, and +24.6%, with five-day follow-throughs of +18%, +24%, and +57% respectively — a pattern that suggests the market has consistently rewarded results, though the starting point in all three cases was a stock trading at a meaningfully different price and valuation. Correlated peers were mixed on the week: LUNR fell 4.6% and ACHR dropped 13.8%, while FLY was roughly flat — reinforcing that RKLB's bounce was idiosyncratic rather than sector-driven.
What to watch: whether the short rebuild continues through the first week of July at the same pace, and whether availability drops below 300% — the level at which borrow tightness historically starts to feature in short-side cost calculations.
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