Something unusual is happening in Teradyne's lending market. Shorts are exiting fast — yet the cost to borrow just surged nearly 200% in a single week. The two moves usually don't run together.
Short interest fell to 5.3% of the free float as of July 17. That's down 12.5% over the week and roughly 15% off the late-June peak above 6.4%. The covering trend reported five days ago has continued and accelerated.
The cost to borrow tells a different story. It jumped to 1.38% annually on July 17 — up from 0.42% the day before and 0.46% a week earlier. That's a near-tripling in 24 hours. Over the past month, CTB has risen 521%.
The divergence is notable. Fewer shares are borrowed now than a week ago. Yet the price to borrow them rose sharply. One explanation: a cluster of remaining shorts rolled or reopened positions simultaneously, creating a brief spike in borrow demand against a smaller outstanding pool.
Availability remains extremely loose at 5,753% — meaning roughly 57 shares sit available to lend for every one currently borrowed. There is no structural squeeze pressure here. The CTB move looks like a transient demand event rather than a market tightening.
The price context matters. TER fell 10.4% last week and is down 21.3% over the past month. It closed at $322.36 on July 17.
That decline comes despite a wave of upward analyst revisions. Goldman Sachs raised its target to $465 on July 6. Susquehanna went to $550, and Cantor Fitzgerald to $550, both in late June. Bank of America lifted to $525. The consensus price target now sits at $429.88 — implying roughly 33% upside from the current price.
The gap between where analysts think the stock should trade and where it actually trades is now substantial. That gap has widened as the stock dropped through June and into July.
The put/call ratio has pulled back to 0.89 from the 0.98 spike flagged earlier this week. The PCR is now just 0.26 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.88 — essentially neutral. The defensive hedging burst appears to have faded for now.
Earnings arrive July 28. The last two quarterly prints produced a -23.8% and -9.6% one-day move respectively. The CTB spike and continued short covering both resolve around that date. The analyst consensus — at $430 — will face its first real test then.
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