thyssenkrupp nucera AG & Co. KGaA enters the back half of August with one of the most extreme borrow configurations in its trading history — costs spiking, availability near zero, and a short score climbing to a fresh high.
The clearest tension is in the lending market. Availability on NCH2 has barely any room left — just 2% of short interest remains available to borrow, against a 52-week low of 0.01%. That means for every 50 shares already borrowed and sold short, fewer than one remains available for new shorts. Cost to borrow, which averaged around 35% through most of June, has been violently erratic over the past six weeks — swinging from 25% in early July to a peak of 340% on July 31, and settling near 99% as of August 10. That kind of oscillation reflects a lending pool under severe stress: supply is paper-thin, and any shift in demand sends rates lurching. The ORTEX short score — a composite of these lending signals — climbed to 95.5 on August 11, up from 91.2 at the end of July and rising every single session in that period. Both the utilization rank and the days-to-cover rank sit at the bottom percentile of the universe, underscoring how little slack remains in the borrow.
The Street offers a counterweight to the bearish positioning. The analyst consensus price target of €10.52 is roughly 31% above the current price of €8.05, implying that the professional view remains constructively positioned relative to where shares trade. The stock has recovered modestly — up about 7% over the past month and 1.8% on the week — but still sits well below the level where analysts would call the gap closed. Valuation multiples are difficult to interpret cleanly: nucera is loss-making, with deeply negative PE and EV/EBITDA readings that reflect a company still burning cash as it scales its electrolyser order book. Price-to-book sits at 1.38, edging higher over the past month as the share price has crept up. Factor scores are broadly weak — EPS momentum ranks in the bottom 2% of the universe on both 30- and 90-day horizons, a reminder that near-term earnings dynamics remain deeply negative even as longer-run hydrogen demand theses hold.
Ownership is concentrated and largely static, which matters for understanding the short squeeze dynamic. Thyssenkrupp Projekt 1 GmbH controls 50.2% of shares, and Federico De Nora holds another 25.9%. Between them, these two strategic holders lock up over three-quarters of the company. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia holds a further 6%. That leaves a genuinely small free float — around 18% — which explains both why the borrow market is so tight and why a relatively modest short interest by absolute standards produces such extreme lending conditions. Van Eck and BlackRock both trimmed positions in July, marginally reducing their already-small exposures.
The only earnings comparison with price reaction data comes from May 22, when nucera posted results and the stock rose 7.3% the next day before settling to a 5.7% gain by the end of the week. The next scheduled event is not until December 16, so an earnings catalyst is distant. However, the August 12 earnings date appearing in the history data — announced with very little lead time — warrants attention: if results were released today, the combination of near-zero borrow availability and a fresh short score high would make any sharp move in either direction difficult to absorb cleanly in the lending market.
What to watch is whether borrow availability moves back below 1% — the level that prevailed through most of July — or whether the modest loosening seen in recent days signals that some short covering has begun, taking pressure off a lending pool that has been running on fumes for weeks.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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