Hertz Global Holdings has shed 59% in a month. The borrow market has been at or near zero availability for over a week. Every C-suite insider who traded in the past 90 days sold. And yet options traders are still leaning toward calls. The same divergence flagged across multiple prior notes has not resolved — it has calcified.
This note focuses on what has changed since July 5. The answer is: less than the pace of alerts suggests. The structural picture is the same. The question is how long it holds.
Availability stands at 0% as of July 2. Every share in the lending pool is currently lent out. That reading has held at or near zero every session since June 24 — a continuous 9-day freeze at the tightest level of the past year.
Cost to borrow has pulled back. It sits at 4.17% now, down from the June 26 peak of 7.03%. That is a meaningful reduction. But for context: in May and early June, CTB sat between 1.1% and 1.7%. The borrow is still more than twice as expensive as it was a month ago, even after the retreat.
Short interest is 24.5% of free float — down slightly from the 25.8% reading on July 2, but up 45.7% over the past month. The ORTEX short score is 74.1, placing in the 4th percentile of all tracked names.
On June 30, Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley lowered his price target from $5.00 to $3.50. He kept his Equal-Weight rating. The target is now 65% above where the stock is trading. That gap is less a sign of optimism than a measure of how far the stock has fallen past what analysts had modelled.
The consensus target across all analysts sits at $4.43 — more than double the current price of $2.12. No analyst has upgraded. No one has a Buy. The analyst community is not bearish enough to match where the market is pricing the stock.
The put/call ratio is 1.38. Its 20-day mean is 1.91. The PCR is running 1.5 standard deviations below that mean. In mid-June, it sat above 2.20 for ten consecutive sessions. The shift has been sustained for two weeks and has continued even as the stock made fresh lows. Options positioning and the short book are pointing in opposite directions.
Earnings are August 6. The last two quarterly reports produced a -6.6% one-day move and a -10% five-day move respectively. Options traders are, for now, not positioning defensively into that date.
The availability freeze has lasted nine sessions. If it breaks — shares returned, borrow unlocking — cost to borrow will likely fall further and short-covering could follow. August 6 earnings remain the next hard catalyst. The Morgan Stanley target cut to $3.50, made when the stock was already at $2.27, signals the fundamental case hasn't improved. The next update will matter.
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Hertz Global Holdings ends June with its borrow market fully locked, short interest at a multi-week high, and every C-suite insider who traded in the past three months selling — a convergence that leaves the stock with…
The same divergence flagged three days ago has intensified. HTZ now has essentially no shares left to borrow, cost to borrow has nearly doubled again since the last note, and options traders have pushed to their most…
