Nebius Group reported July 28 earnings into a stock already down 22% on the week — and the short book that has defined this name all month came out essentially intact.
The post-earnings picture is one of reshuffling rather than resolution. Short interest nudged up another 1% on the week to 28.8% of the free float — the month-long 37% build documented across recent coverage is still fully in place. What changed is availability. The July 25 note flagged a reopening to 45% as longs sold and returned borrowed shares to the pool. Since then, availability has tightened sharply back to 21.6% — a meaningful reversal that suggests new short demand absorbed the freed inventory quickly. Two weeks ago this pool was near zero. The swing from zero to 45% and back to 21% in under two weeks tells you how contested the borrow market remains. Cost to borrow has actually eased to 0.95%, down 15% on the week, so absolute friction for new shorts is low even as availability tightens. The ORTEX short score is steady at 71.1 — exactly the level it has held all month — with a utilization rank at the 8th percentile and short score rank at the 5th percentile, both signalling an extremely elevated short positioning setup.
Options traders remain more defensive than usual, though the conviction is moderate rather than extreme. The put/call ratio is 1.21, above its 20-day average of 1.17 but only 0.7 standard deviations above the mean — a long way from the panicked hedging that would register near the 52-week high of 1.29. That reading suggests protection-buying has been steady this week rather than accelerating into the earnings print.
The Street's reaction to the print will be watched closely, because analyst positioning was already bullish heading in. Baird initiated coverage on July 22 at Outperform with a $250 target. Northland raised its target to $410 from $248 earlier this month. The consensus skews strongly positive, with the only registered sell-side lean being a single underperform rating. Even the most cautious recent initiations — BNP Paribas at Neutral with a $255 target, DA Davidson at Neutral with $250 — imply 50% upside from current levels. Morgan Stanley's Equal-Weight at $144 is the sole below-market target and sits below the current price of $169.69, which is the only data point on the Street that supports the bear case. The bull case centres on the $17 billion Microsoft revenue agreement and Nebius's vertically integrated AI cloud stack. Bears point to premium valuation — the price-to-book is 8.5x, down 3 points over the past month — and the negative earnings trajectory, with the EPS surprise factor score at just the 4th percentile.
Institutional ownership adds an interesting wrinkle. CEO and founder Arkady Volozh holds 11.5% of shares and added 821,662 shares as recently as July 1. BlackRock and State Street both added modestly in Q2. Against that, Chairman John Boynton sold just under $1.1 million worth of stock on July 15 across multiple tranches — small relative to the company, but the only insider selling on record this period. Net insider activity over 90 days is positive at roughly $33.9 million, mostly reflecting Volozh's ongoing accumulation.
The stock fell 9.7% on July 28 itself — the earnings day — bringing the one-month loss to 29%. The May 13 print triggered a 23% one-day rally and a further 7% gain over the following week, which establishes the range of potential reactions. Peers had a rough week too: KEEL dropped 19.7%, BTBT fell 17.7%, and CORZ lost 13.6%, suggesting broad sector pressure rather than NBIS-specific selling. The next scheduled earnings event is August 12. The question into that date is whether the short book — which survived a 19% squeeze, a 15% reversal, and now a 22% weekly decline without materially covering — finally shows signs of unwinding, or whether the freshly tightened availability signals another round of borrow demand building.
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