Lucid Group has just printed earnings and the data that matters most this week isn't what management said — it's that the lending market is finally showing its first genuine signs of relief after three weeks of near-total lockdown.
Availability has opened from effectively zero to 4.1% — a move that sounds modest but represents the biggest breathing room shorts have had since early July. For context, availability spent most of the past month below 0.5%, with multiple days at 0.001%. The pool is still tight, but for the first time shorts can actually enter or exit without hunting for shares. Cost to borrow has fallen hard too: from a peak above 310% in mid-July, it has now retreated to 51.9%, down 25% on the week. That's still a punishing rate, but the direction of travel has decisively shifted. Short interest itself has continued its slow unwind — 55.5 million shares, 17.1% of float, down nearly 8% on the week and almost 20% from a month ago. The overall picture is one of decompression: borrow is loosening, the cost is falling, and shorts are steadily reducing exposure from the mid-July peak of 65–66 million shares. The ORTEX short score has edged down to 84.8 from 85.6 a week ago. Still in the bottom 1st percentile of the universe, but the slow drift lower is consistent with cover activity rather than fresh building.
Options positioning has also begun to ease from its most extreme pre-earnings levels. The put/call ratio pulled back to 1.44, down from 1.48 the prior session and well below the 1.66–1.75 readings that preceded the August 4 print. That still sits above its 20-day average of 1.34 — roughly 1.4 standard deviations elevated — so defensive hedging hasn't been completely unwound. But the contrast with last week is real: options traders were bracing hard into the number, and now some of that protection is coming off.
The Street's view on LCID remains cautious and has been drifting lower all year. RBC Capital's Tom Narayan trimmed his target to $7 in mid-July — the most recent action and now essentially in line with the current $7.78 price. The mean analyst target is $8.30, leaving only modest nominal upside. Citi's lone Buy rating carries a $14 target, but that was set in May and looks disconnected from where the stock and peer targets have moved. The bear case is well-understood: a $773 million adjusted EBITDA loss, $1.4 billion of free cash flow consumption, and no clear path to profitability in the near term. The bull case rests on the Uber robotaxi partnership, the upcoming Midsize Platform launch, and the Saudi financial backstop from the Public Investment Fund — which controls 45% of shares outstanding and has shown no signs of wavering. The EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 85th percentile, suggesting Lucid has been beating lowered expectations, though that bar has fallen sharply through the year.
The ownership structure remains the most structurally unusual feature of this stock. PIF's 45% stake is immovable, and Uber's 9.7% position — built via the robotaxi partnership announced in April — is strategic rather than financial. That means the true free float is thin, which amplifies every move in short interest. With Uber holding 37.8 million shares and PIF holding 177 million, roughly 55% of outstanding shares aren't available for normal trading. That's the mechanical reason the borrow market got so extreme in July: a heavily shorted stock with a structurally narrow float has almost no buffer when covering demand spikes.
RIVN fell 5.6% on the week while XPEV dropped 5.2%, giving LCID's 1.5% weekly decline a less dramatic look in sector context. The next scheduled earnings event is November 6. What to watch between now and then is whether the borrow pool continues to loosen — a sustained move above 10% availability would signal that the squeeze configuration of July has genuinely unwound — and whether the Midsize Platform timing commentary from the August 4 report changes the analyst target distribution materially.
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