Intuitive Machines has shed another 17% this week, closing at $17.85, as the themes flagged in last week's note — heavy insider selling and a rebuilding short book — continue to define the tape.
The short position remains extreme and is still growing. Bears hold roughly 32% of the free float, up 16% over the past month, with short shares climbing to 38.2 million. What has shifted notably this week is the lending market: borrow availability has tightened sharply to just 14.9%, down from 32% at the start of the week — roughly one share available for every seven already borrowed. That puts the lending pool in firmly tight territory, though it remains above the year's floor of 0.33% hit earlier in the spring. Borrowing costs, paradoxically, have fallen — the cost to borrow is down 20% on the week to 0.66%, and is half the level it was in early June. That disconnect suggests the tightening availability reflects fewer shares returning to the pool rather than a new rush to establish shorts. The ORTEX short score has edged up to 69.6 — a seven-session high — and LUNR ranks in the bottom 3rd percentile on short-score rank, confirming the position remains extreme in a universe context.
Options traders are not showing the same alarm. The put/call ratio of 0.38 runs below its 20-day average of 0.41, and the z-score is slightly negative — meaning the options market is, if anything, less defensive than usual despite the price collapse. Call open interest is outweighing puts, which is a striking divergence from what the short book implies. That gap between options sentiment and short positioning is the clearest tension in LUNR's current setup. One explanation: retail-flavoured call buyers are leaning against the shorts, as has happened in this name before when it was a momentum darling.
The Street remains constructive on paper, but the data is increasingly stale. The most recent analyst actions — all from May — were uniformly positive, with Roth Capital, Cantor Fitzgerald, Canaccord, and B. Riley all raising targets after the Q1 print. Mean consensus target is $40.78, implying more than 100% upside from today's close. The EPS surprise factor scores in the 97th percentile, and the company's 54% year-on-year revenue growth is genuine. But with the stock now trading nearly 60% below where some of those targets were set, and with no fresh analyst commentary in the past six weeks, the Street's constructive view is untested against the current price. The EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed to around 90x on a declining base — down about 6 points over thirty days — as the sell-off erodes enterprise value.
The insider selling thread from last week's note has not reversed. Chairman Kamal Ghaffarian sold on June 29 — most recently at $20.80, still well above today's $17.85 close — adding to the June tranche that saw co-founder Tim Crain exit $3.3 million of stock on June 18. Net insider selling over 90 days totals $30.5 million across 1.1 million net shares. Ghaffarian still holds 2.27% of the company, but the cadence of sales tracking the stock lower is a pattern that has continued unbroken through this decline. BlackRock and State Street both added to positions as of June 30 — BlackRock by 1.1 million shares — providing a counterpoint, though passive-flow additions at index rebalancing are structurally different from discretionary conviction buys.
The picture across the peer group offers little comfort. RKLB fell 10% on Tuesday and is down 15% on the week. RDW lost 10% Tuesday. SIDU is down nearly 20% on the week. The sector-wide selling suggests macro or thematic pressure on NewSpace names rather than a LUNR-specific catalyst, though LUNR's much larger short position means it absorbs such moves with greater amplitude. Next earnings are scheduled for August 7 — the previous two prints produced day-one drops of 5% and 13% respectively — and with availability tightening again into that date, the borrow market will be worth watching closely.
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