PONY reports again on August 25 — just one week after its August 18 release — and the most notable shift since that print is not in analyst targets but in the lending market, where availability has dropped sharply.
Borrow availability has tightened hard heading into Monday's event. Availability fell to 28.2% by August 20, down from around 51% just a week earlier — a 45% drop in seven days. That puts roughly three shares borrowed for every one still available to lend, the tightest conditions since the 52-week low of 4.8%. Short interest itself has moved in the opposite direction, falling about 21% over the past month to roughly 23.3 million shares — a meaningful pullback from the 29–30 million range seen in mid-July. So fewer shares are short, but the pool of available borrow has shrunk even faster, which explains the tightening. Cost to borrow is still modest at around 1%, but has risen roughly 4% on the week. Options positioning offers no drama: the put/call ratio of 0.218 is almost exactly in line with its 20-day average, suggesting options traders are neither hedging aggressively nor reaching for upside. The stock itself has recovered — up 6.3% on Friday and 19% over the past month to $8.23 — reversing most of the post-August 18 slide.
The analyst debate is unchanged from last week's post-earnings note, and remains the defining feature of the PONY setup. B of A's Ming Hsun Lee trimmed his target to $17 from $19 on August 19 while keeping a Buy — the most recent action from a major firm, and a signal of conviction tempered by caution. The broader bull camp (B of A, HSBC, UBS, Citi, Macquarie, Jefferies) still implies more than 150% upside from current levels, even after BofA's cut. Barclays sits alone on the skeptical side at Equal-Weight with a $10 target, essentially arguing the stock is near fair value. The core disagreement is not about near-term numbers — it is about whether Pony AI's robotaxi commercialization timeline justifies a pre-profitability premium at all. Negative EV/EBITDA, deeply negative earnings, and an ORTEX quality score near the bottom of the universe are the bears' ammunition. The price-to-book of roughly 3x is the one valuation anchor bulls can point to as tangible.
One ownership detail worth noting: Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan added 15.1 million shares in the quarter to June 30, making it the third-largest holder at nearly 8.5% of shares. Baillie Gifford added 6.1 million shares over the same period. Both are long-duration institutional holders, and their additions represent a meaningful vote of confidence from investors with patient capital — a partial counterweight to the fundamental concerns the bears cite.
The August 25 print will test whether Pony AI can show any commercial progress — fleet expansion, revenue per vehicle, or a credible path toward operational leverage — that begins to close the gap between the stock's pre-profitability reality and the long-term thesis its analyst supporters are paying forward.
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