SPCX Earnings Preview: Borrow Gone, Bears Dug In, Print Due Monday

SPCX arrives at Monday's earnings release in the most constrained borrow market of its short trading history, with a $108 stock carrying analyst targets that average more than double that price.

The borrow situation has not improved since Thursday's report — it has held at its floor. Availability remains at 0.57%, meaning one share is available for every 176 already lent out. That is a record low, down from 4.0% just two sessions ago and from 160% in late June. Cost to borrow has tripled over the past month to 5.21%, up 62% on the week alone. The ORTEX short score has climbed to 70.1 — its highest reading since listing — and the short base itself sits at roughly 209.9 million shares, up 7% on the week. Bears are paying significantly more to hold their positions heading into a binary event and have not blinked.

Options positioning offers a mild contrast to that aggression. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.83, about 1.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.93. That is the least defensive options reading in several weeks — a notable shift from the more cautious posture seen in mid-July when the PCR was running above 1.0. Whether that reflects bulls buying calls into the print or bears rotating out of put protection is difficult to determine from the ratio alone, but it sits in a different register from the short-side conviction the lending data describes.

The analyst divide remains the structural backdrop to all of this. The consensus is Hold, but that masks a $140 spread between the most bearish target ($115, HSBC) and the most bullish ($255, Deutsche Bank and Macquarie). HSBC's initiation last week at exactly the then-current price is the clearest expression of the bear case: the stock is fairly valued now, not in two years. Bulls — Needham, Evercore, Cantor Fitzgerald, Deutsche Bank — point to Starlink's monetisation trajectory, government contract depth, and long-run positioning in launch infrastructure. The stock closed Friday at $108.37, down 36% over the past month, meaning it has already fallen through HSBC's target. That changes the framing: bulls need the print to rebuild the narrative, while the six Hold-rated analysts face the question of whether $108 is now already below fair value.

The August 4 print is therefore a test of whether the revenue and margin profile that bulls have priced into $230–$255 targets has any near-term foundation — and whether a short base that has added into a fully exhausted borrow pool has anywhere to go if the numbers surprise in either direction.