Intuitive Machines enters July with a striking split between what insiders are doing and what the Street is saying — and the short book is quietly catching up with both.
The most conspicuous signal this week is insider selling. Chairman and co-founder Kamal Ghaffarian sold shares across multiple tranches in early and mid-June, unloading stock at prices ranging from roughly $27 to $43 — well above today's $21.39 close. Co-founder Tim Crain added his own sales on June 18. Total net insider selling over the past 90 days reaches $31 million in value across more than a million net shares. These are founding shareholders, not routine options exercises, and the selling has tracked the stock almost all the way down a 51% monthly decline.
Short interest has been rebuilding in parallel. Bears now hold roughly 32% of the free float — up 8.5% on the week and 27% over the past month — making this the most heavily shorted the name has been in at least 30 days. That 32% figure places LUNR in the bottom 3rd percentile of the universe on short-score rank, meaning the short positioning is extreme relative to peers. Despite the size of the short position, borrowing costs are remarkably tame at just 0.83%, a rate that has actually eased sharply from above 1.5% in late May. The cheap borrow is partly explained by availability: shares available to lend have loosened meaningfully over the past week, rising from below 4% of the lending pool to around 19% now, after a brief episode earlier in June where the entire lending pool was fully exhausted. That mid-June tightness has since released, making new short positions easier and cheaper to establish — which may partly explain why the short count keeps climbing.
Options traders turned markedly more defensive on the last day of June. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.67 — a reading that, against the 20-day average of 0.42, registers more than four standard deviations above the norm and marks the highest level in the past year. That is an abrupt single-session shift; the PCR had been steady between 0.37 and 0.43 for most of the preceding month. Whether that reflects fresh hedging against further downside or outright bearish positioning, the message from the options market is the same: protection demand surged on Tuesday.
The Street remains formally constructive, which is where the tension gets interesting. Following May's earnings, analysts at Roth Capital, Cantor Fitzgerald, Canaccord, and B. Riley all raised targets, with Roth most recently lifting to $75 in late May. The mean analyst target now sits around $41 — nearly double the current price. Bulls point to the Q4 gross profit recovery (up 1,150% year-over-year), the Lanteris acquisition expanding manufacturing capacity, and the company's structural alignment with growing NASA and defense lunar budgets. Bears counter with a still-negative EBITDA, a history of operating losses, and the company's early-stage profile — revenues of $44.8 million against an enterprise value approaching $3.5 billion implies the valuation demands a great deal of execution. The EV/EBITDA multiple, while falling from its peak, still prints above 90x. EPS momentum over 90 days ranks in the top percentile of the universe, but the 30-day trajectory has deteriorated sharply, ranking near the bottom at just 7th percentile.
Earnings history adds one more cautionary data point. The last two prints both sent the stock lower — down 13% on the day after the June 4 release and down 5% after the May 14 report. The next earnings event is scheduled for August 7. That is the date where all of these threads converge: insider selling at elevated prices, a rebuilding short book, cheap borrow making new positions easy to add, and an options market that just printed its most defensive reading in a year — all of it pointing toward a print where the question is less whether growth is happening and more whether the pace and the path to profitability can justify a stock that has already halved in a month.
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