Lucid Group is a week past its earnings print and the decompression story is real — but incomplete.
The most striking development since last week's note is the collapse in borrowing costs. Cost to borrow has more than halved in eight trading days, dropping from above 51% at the post-earnings print to 30.3% now. That is a significant move in absolute terms. In context, however, it follows a peak above 310% in mid-July, so even at 30%, shorts are still paying punishing annualised rates to hold positions. The availability picture reinforces that caution: despite briefly opening to 6.9% on August 10, the pool has snapped back to just 0.9% — effectively one share available for every 110 lent out. That is near the 52-week trough of zero, and it has sat below 1% on most days for the past six weeks. New short positions remain extremely difficult to establish; existing ones are expensive to hold.
Short interest itself continues its slow unwind. Shorts hold 55.3 million shares, equal to 17.1% of the free float — down 17% from the mid-July peak of 66 million shares, and down another 0.3% on the week. The direction of travel is consistent. The ORTEX short score has also eased to 83.0 from 85.2 a fortnight ago, though it still ranks in the bottom 1st percentile of the universe. The options market has followed the same cautious-but-less-extreme pattern: the put/call ratio is 1.54, still above its 20-day average of 1.39 and roughly 1.5 standard deviations elevated, but nothing like the 3-standard-deviation spike recorded ahead of earnings. Defensive positioning remains above baseline; the panic has faded.
The Street's view is firmly sceptical, with only isolated bulls. Citigroup holds a Buy with a $14 target, and Cantor Fitzgerald reiterates Neutral at $14 — but those targets, issued in May, look difficult to reconcile with a stock trading at $6.54 and a consensus mean of $8.20. RBC Capital's Tom Narayan lowered his target to $7 on July 13, the most recent action, keeping a Sector Perform and citing no fundamental improvement. The bear case centres on suspended 2026 guidance, a $773 million adjusted EBITDA loss in Q1, and liquidity running at roughly $3.2 billion — enough to fund operations but insufficient to absorb further execution slippage without dilution. The bull case rests on the Saudi Public Investment Fund's 44.9% anchor position, Uber's recently disclosed 9.6% stake (built via a 24 million share addition), and the robotaxi and hands-free autonomy programmes as longer-dated catalysts. Earnings history offers little comfort for near-term optimism: the last print produced a 13% one-day decline and a 16% five-day slide, consistent with a stock where every report resets expectations lower.
The Uber position is worth a separate look. Uber reported holding 37.8 million shares as of June 30, adding 24 million in the quarter — a meaningful new institutional anchor alongside the PIF. BlackRock and State Street also added modestly in the same period. That institutional buying sits in direct tension with the insider picture, where the acting CEO, CFO, and several directors all sold small parcels in June at prices around $5.68 — near the recent lows. Insider sales were nominal in dollar terms, but the uniformity of the direction is noted.
The stock closed at $6.54, down 2.4% on the day and flat on the week, while peers diverged: RIVN gained 2.4% on the week and TSLA added 1.9%, suggesting Wednesday's weakness in LCID was more company-specific than sector-driven. The next earnings date is set for November 6. Between now and then, the key variables are whether the borrow pool loosens further and stabilises above 5% — which would signal genuine de-risking rather than a series of brief air pockets — and whether any update on the robotaxi or Uber partnership timeline shifts the growth narrative before the next quarterly print.
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