Schrödinger enters July with a split personality: the stock rallied 8% on the week before giving back 6.6% in a single session on June 30, leaving it at $16.25 — a one-day drop that arrived with no accompanying surge in short positioning, making the selloff look more like profit-taking than a fresh bear thesis.
The short side of the ledger is notable but not escalating. Short interest has been stubbornly anchored near 16.2% of float for most of June — roughly 10.4 million shares — edging up just 1.3% on June 30 and barely moving on the week (-0.03%). That persistence at an elevated level, rather than any directional surge, is the dominant theme. What has shifted is the cost to borrow, which jumped 64% over the week to 0.70% annualised. That's still an objectively cheap rate, so the move reflects tightening at the margin rather than a stressed borrow market. Availability remains generous at 244%, well above the 52-week low of 159%, meaning plenty of shares are still available relative to what's already borrowed. The short score has drifted higher to 69.7 — up from 68.3 two weeks ago — which reflects the accumulation of structural pressure signals rather than any single catalyst. Options sentiment has turned more defensive recently. The put/call ratio is running at 0.51, roughly one standard deviation above its 20-day average of 0.40. That's not an extreme reading — the 52-week high is 0.69 — but the shift is clear: PCR sat consistently in the 0.31–0.33 range through early June before jumping sharply in the back half of the month, coinciding with SDGR's volatile price action around the June 22 earnings event.
The Street picture is a study in cautious positioning. Analyst data is approximately 48 days old (most recent change from Morgan Stanley in mid-May), which limits how much weight to place on the consensus — but the direction of travel has been consistent: every firm that has moved a price target since January has lowered it. Morgan Stanley cut to $17, Keybanc trimmed to $20, UBS sits at $13, and TD Cowen moved to $24. The mean target is $20.88, implying roughly 28% upside from current levels — but that gap reflects the scale of target reductions rather than fresh conviction. Factor scores paint a similarly mixed picture: EPS surprise ranks in the 84th percentile, suggesting the company has been beating estimates reliably, but forward EPS momentum for the next 12 months sits in just the 2nd percentile — near the bottom of the universe — and the short score rank (6th percentile) flags the stock as among the more heavily shorted names in its cohort. The price-to-book sits at 3.9x, up from 3.3x 30 days ago, driven by the stock's recovery rather than any improvement in book value.
Ownership offers one genuinely notable data point. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust holds 21.6% of shares — a cornerstone position that hasn't moved recently. Rubric Capital Management added 1.8 million shares in Q1, lifting its stake to 8% of the company. Those two holders together account for nearly 30% of outstanding shares, which structurally limits how freely the float trades and helps explain why short interest, at 16% of float, represents a larger portion of what's actually available to borrow than the headline figure suggests.
The June 22 earnings print dropped the stock 4.6% on the day but recovered to a 10.3% gain over the following five days — a pattern worth noting ahead of the next results, scheduled for August 5. Whether the same dynamic plays out will depend on whether the company's AI-driven drug discovery platform can convert its partnership momentum into guidance that justifies a stock that has spent months trading well below analyst targets.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open SDGR 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.
